The Journey to the East     by Hermann Hesse, Translated by Hilda Rosner Original title: Die Morgenlandfahrt Original language: German Published by Peter Owen Publishers Pub. Date: May 15, 2001 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 93 pages ISBN: 0720611318 List Price: $15.99, £7.99 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 1976 Format: Paperback, 118 pages Dimensions: 0.34 x 8.26 x 5.50 inches ISBN: 0374500363 Edition: Reissue List Price: $12.00 Not available for ordering Published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux Pub. Date: July 1988 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 118 pages ISBN: 0374180369 Edition: Reissue List Price: $4.95 Not available for ordering Published by Picador Pub. Date: February 2003 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 118 pages Dimensions: 0.37 x 8.24 x 5.5 ISBN: 0312421680 List Price: $12.00, £7.63 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.63 Published by Paladin Pub. Date: 1989 Format: Paperback, 93 pages Not available for ordering Published by Picador Pub. Date: 1995 Format: Paperback, 93 pages List Price: £4.99 Not available for ordering

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Everybody — hopefully — has at least one book that they can read and reread, enjoy again and again and draw heart and energy from, like the company of an old friend. The Journey to the East is one of those very special books. A book too, that seems to be a perfect use of its particular medium, the brief novella based around the reminiscence of a single narrator. It would be hard to imagine it as a film; such is the air of exciting and mysterious insubstantiality Hesse weaves around a seemingly concrete argument — a journey.

It’s a spiritual journey, the spiritual journey of a cultivated European traveling through his own culture, who doesn’t set off merely to discover newness and wonder elsewhere but who, as an educated, reflective journeyer carries wonders within himself as well. Journey to the East is a magnificent travel book because it relates a journey to nowhere that never took place and yet continues through every day that passes. It’s a journey outside the ‘world deluded by money, number and time’, a journey into the wonderful possibilities of life, of life rich in grace and enchantment, where the best things of the human spirit and natural beauty combine. The fellow-pilgrims on Hesse’s journey are people who have detached themselves from the noisy, ratcheting world of contemporary routines and absorbed something of what is profound and eternal.

Hesse’s traveller is a man like any other, so that just as he reaches the attainment of his quest he allows it to slip from him and the book then becomes a story of the shattered idealism of youth and the long subsequent search to recover or replace it. In fact the narrative is a very sophisticated interweaving of the pursuit of the grail of truth and of the delusions, contumely and dissent around that pursuit.

The book can be read as a beautiful story of a crisis of (creative) faith and the struggle to retain it. Although one of Hesse’s shortest works it stands alongside the more famous Steppenwolf as his best; subtle, sketched rather than spelt out, wonderfully wise, a good investment for every traveller on the planet.

‘What life is when it is beautiful and happy—a game! Naturally one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier.’ p72

‘I looked for and found the place in the archives. There lay a tiny locket which could be opened and contained a miniature portrait of a ravishingly beautiful princess, which in an instant reminded me of all three thousand and one nights, of all the tales of my youth, of all the dreams and wishes of that great period when, in order to travel to Fatima in the Orient, I had served my noviciate and had reported myself as a member of the League. The locket was wrapped in a finely-spun mauve silk kerchief, which had an immeasurably remote and sweet fragrance, reminiscent of princesses and the East.’ p94-95

‘Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to understand and vindicate human life. Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and fulfil their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side.’ p106

‘Hesse was a great writer . . . complex, subtle, allusive.’ –New York Times