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Amazon.com's Price: $14.99 as of 11/22/2009 18:51 EST
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9788170262442
ISBN: 8170262445
Label: Heritage Publishers
Manufacturer: Heritage Publishers
Number Of Pages: 93
Publication Date: March 31, 2009
Publisher: Heritage Publishers
Studio: Heritage Publishers
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Journey to the East is written from the point of view of a man (coincidentally called 'H. H.') who becomes a member of 'The League', a timeless religious sect whose members include famous fictional and real characters, such as Plato, Mozart, Pythagoras, Paul Klee, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Baudelaire, and the ferryman Vasudeva, a character from one of Hesse's earlier works, Siddhartha. A branch of the group goes on a pilgrimage to 'the East' in search of the 'ultimate Truth'. The narrator speaks of traveling through both time and space, across geography imaginary and real. Although at first fun and enlightening, the Journey runs into a crisis in a deep mountain gorge called Morbio Inferiore when Leo, aparently a simple servant, disappears, causing the group to plummet into anxiety and argument. Leo is described as happy, pleasant, handsome, beloved by everyone, having a rapport with animals - to a discerning reader, he seems a great deal more than a simple servant, but nobody in the pilgrimage, including the narrator, seems to get this. Nor does anyone seem to wonder why the group dissolves in dissension and bickering after Leo disappears. Instead they accuse Leo of taking with him various objects which they seem to be missing (and which turn up later) and which they regard as very important (and which later turn out not to be very important), and they blame him for the eventual disintegration of the group and failure of the Journey. Years later the narrator tries to write his story of the Journey, even though he has lost contact with the group and believes the League no longer exists. But he is unable to put together any coherent account of it; his whole life has sunk into despair and disillusionment since the failure of the one thing which was most important to him, and he has even sold the violin with which he once offered music to the group during the journey. Finally, at the advice of a friend, he finds the servant Leo and, having failed in his attempt to re-establish communication with him or even be recognized by him when he meets him on a park bench, writes him a long, impassioned letter of 'grievances, remorse and entreaty' and posts it to him that night. The next morning Leo appears in the narrator's home and tells him he has to appear before the High Throne to be judged by the officials of the League. It turns out (to the narrator's surprise) that Leo, the simple servant, is actually President of League, and the crisis in Morbio Inferiore was a test of faith which the narrator and everyone else flunked rather dismally - and H. H. continues to flunk test after test even after finding this out. But the final dénouement is a stroke of Hesse's typical Eastern mysticism at its finest.
Average Rating: 
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Hesse's Journey to the East - to my mind - is a thematic twin of Kundera's Book of Laughing and Forgetting. For me, it is a treatise on memory. Post-modern in its recursive self-referencing, it is also an epistemological manifesto as to what can be known.
Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008)
www.eatingthemoment.com
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Hermann Hesse wrote some of the most important novels and essays of the twentieth century. His primary literary work (part materialist protest, part spiritual quest) spanned almost half a century (1899-1943) and culminated in the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. He lived through the pain of World Wars I & II and looked outside Europe for alternative philosophies. He became a Swiss citizen in 1923 and lived in exile from his native Germany, in part because of his anti-war views. The problems that ... Read More
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The Journey to the East is a novel; a kind of dictionary of most of Hesse's greatest interests (Romantic literature, Christianity, Eastern Religions, psychology, chivalry and the literature based on the Paladins); but most of all it is an affirmation of the need to live a life of spiritual depth, creativity and imagination. It is also important to remember that the original German title refers to the "Morgenland," the Land of the Morning that was E.T.A. Hoffmann's name for fairyland. The Journey ... Read More
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An idealist goes off in search of enlightenment, roams his searching fruitlessly, and in his failure, finally looks in the correct direction.
Read it cover to cover. Put it down for a day. Read it again.
If you can do this, and not reflect on your own goals, purpose, and understanding of your life, you should probably stick with TV. The story is engaging, and an uncomplicated person might feel the end is a let down. But the book isn't really entertainment, so much as a ... Read More
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I initially was assigned this book for an introductory leadership class, I have since searched the internet for a copy of my own. Hesse has skillfully used a journey both physical and emotional of one man H.H. to tell of the true art of servant leadership.
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EAN: 9788170262442
ISBN: 8170262445
Label: Heritage Publishers
Manufacturer: Heritage Publishers
Number Of Pages: 93
Publication Date: March 31, 2009
Publisher: Heritage Publishers
Studio: Heritage Publishers