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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 that first book
(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
Counted among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century,
HERMANN HESSEwas born in 1877. Rebelling against a stern monastic
education, he worked as a locksmith and a bookseller before
embarking on a 65-year writing career. Having travelled 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. |
