He takes up with a courtesan, who introduces him to a merchant, and from them he learns much about pleasure on the mortal plane. He’s all right, and Govinda is smitten and joins the following. They hear tell of a new type of holy man, a guy named Buddha, who is attracting all sorts of attention. Although Siddhartha’s friend Govinda is rather taken with the life, Siddhartha himself finds it hollow and devoid of the enlightenment he seeks. First he and his friend leave their home village to become sayanas, holy scholars who live in poverty. The novel is somewhat episodic, as Siddhartha chases enlightenment in one direction or another. The eponymous protagonist is a member of the Brahmin caste and eager to discover the path to enlightenment. Siddhartha is one of those delightful early twentieth-century novels that by modern standards do not work at all as novels, yet it still has a lot of merits. If you’re Herman Hesse, you write a kind of novella that is also pretty dense yet somehow manages to be simple and light at the same time. If you’re Neal Stephenson, this usually turns into an unwieldy doorstopper that uses its tremendous bullk to beat the reader into submission. Sometimes novels are really philosophy tracts in disguise.
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