He talks about the multiplicity of the self and the infinite potential associated with it, how we often choose to attach fanciful restrictions to the limitless and that every man can have his place among the Immortals. The influence of Indian spirituality on this book is apparent, but Hesse chooses to dissect it using the prism of Western pessimism.

The book didn't change my life and was not meant to, but it gave me hope and hope is always a good thing. I read this book on a twenty four hour train journey surrounded by the bourgeois.

The city of Karlsruhe, Germany, also associates a Hermann Hesse prize. In 1964, people founded the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis, awarded biennially, alternately to a German-language literary journal or to the translator of work of Hesse to a foreign language. Throughout Germany, people named many schools. Young Germans desiring a different and more 'natural' way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country, received enthusiastically Peter Camenzind, first great novel of Hesse.

In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world worldwide fame only came later. Other best-known works of this poet, novelist, and painter include The Glass Bead Game, which, also known as Magister Ludi, explore a search of an individual for spirituality outside society. Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.

Siddhartha novel book review