Translated from the German by Hilda Rosner
It was Henry Miller who suggested to this publisher that he should acquire the rights to a translation of a novel by Hermann Hesse who, despite having recently won the Nobel Prize, was little known outside Germany. The success of Siddhartha ensured the publication of six further books by Hesse of which this one, first appearing in 1956, is regarded today as one of his best.
The narrator of this allegorical tale travels through time and space in a search of ultimate truth. This pilgrimage to the ‘East’ covers both real and imagined lands and takes place not only in our own time but also in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Again, fellow travellers are both real and fictitious — Plato, Pythagoras, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy and Baudelaire.
Like Siddartha, Journey to the East is a timeless novel of broad appeal, particularly among younger readers, stemming from an affinity with the lasting effects of the author’s own youthful rebellion against the strictures of a classical education and his pacifist instincts, combined with an easy lyricism and a well-composed symmetry of style.
‘A great writer . . . complex, subtle, allusive.’ — New York Times Book Review
HERMANN HESSE (1877-1963) is counted among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Germany and raised in a Black Forest town, he rebelled against a stern monastic education and worked as a locksmith and a bookseller before embarking on a 65-year writing career. Having traveled as far as India, he settled in Switzerland in 1911 in opposition to German militarism. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1946, he died in 1963 aged eighty-five.
|Date Published||7th August 2007|