This hodgepodge of influences, along with a strong undercurrent of adventure, shaped a storyline that appealed to “the restless drifter, the alienated youth and the political anarchist alike”, as critic Paul W. But when it came to writing his novel, Hesse’s interest in Hinduism, Taoism, and psychoanalysis (he was analysed by none other than Carl Jung) came together to inform his vision of the life and times of the Buddha. Hesse’s grandfather, a missionary who spent years in India, was fluent in several Indian languages. Hesse (1877-1962) started writing this short novel in 1918, ostensibly with the aim of expounding the tenets of Buddhism in the West, even though his grasp of the doctrinal aspects of the religion was sketchy. Translated into English as early as 1925, it became a key text to transport the message of Eastern spirituality to the war-weary West, and an evergreen favourite for generations of the young and the malcontent.
One that should particularly interest Indian readers is German writer Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, published in 1922 after several years of toil and trouble. Scott Fitzgerald created a stir with his second novel, The Beautiful And The Damned, where he painted the portrait of a marriage gone horribly wrong.Ī century later, as tributes to Ulysses and Kerouac (almost always to On The Road, his youthful novel of travel and self-discovery) continue to pour in, the rest of the landmarks seem to have been erased. And as Joyce began to grapple with the raging controversy generated by his magnum opus, Jack Kerouac, the future star among the Beat writers, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, across the Atlantic. Like Joyce, Virginia Woolf pushed the boundaries of narrative by bringing the “stream of consciousness” style into her novel, Jacob’s Room. Eliot published The Waste Land, which changed the landscape of Anglo-American poetry forever. It became the shining centre of a constellation that would glow ever brighter as the year wore on. In February that year, on 2.2.22 to be precise, Irish writer James Joyce’s iconic novel Ulysses was published by Shakespeare and Company, the famous Parisian book store owned by Sylvia Beach. In 1922, as Europe and America were picking themselves up from the rubble of the Great War, the literary muses decided to bestow their bounty on a generation of readers living during the high noon of modernism.
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