The Man by the River: Rereading Siddhartha, and the Pilgrimage Behind The American of Venice

Siddhartha

I’ve just finished rereading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse—again. I return to it every few years, like one might return to a familiar riverbank: not because the water is the same, but because I have changed.

Siddhartha’s journey—from the son of a Brahmin to an ascetic, to a lover, a man of commerce, a father, and finally to a man who listens—has stayed with me for decades. But with each reread, I find myself less dazzled by his brilliance and more disturbed by his arrogance. He is beautiful, yes. Profound, often. But his early superiority—his dismissal of Govinda, of Gotama, of nearly every doctrine—is not just youthful boldness. It’s a shield. Siddhartha is unreachable precisely because he is so sure of what he knows. He is the unteachable one, and it takes a lifetime of longing, loss, and silence to empty him of that certainty.

And yet, that emptiness—painful and slow—is the soil of transformation.

This idea of transformation-through-emptying has deeply shaped my process as I write The American of Venice. My protagonist is not Siddhartha. He does not seek enlightenment. He seeks refuge. He flees his country that has turned on him. He flees the people who abandoned the ideals their once-great-nation promised. He took flight as a stranger in his own skin because he would no longer return to living a life of keeping up appearances. He does not arrive in Venice as a seeker, but as an exile—unmoored, grieving, and quietly desperate.

But perhaps because he is already emptied out, he is ready in a way Siddhartha was not. Where Siddhartha resisted teachings, my protagonist receives them—gently, wordlessly—from those he meets along the way: a blind bookseller, a shoemaker, a widow, a monk. Their lessons are not offered as doctrine but lived in silence, in kindness, in small acts of shared humanity.

I’ve been rereading more than just Siddhartha. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, with its emphasis on personal legends and omens, offers another path of transformation—one rooted in trust rather than resistance. I plan to revisit The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, Self-Reliance by Emerson, Walden by Thoreau. Each of these voices speaks differently, but all are companions on the same road. I suspect their echoes will shape The American of Venice as it unfolds.

This novel is still forming. The journey is just beginning. Along this road, I have debated about sharing the journey with you as I continue along, but it seemed the right thing to do. I suppose I'd like to share with you what draws me forward isn't necessarily the hope of answers, but an invitation for all of us to become better listeners—to one another, our mates, our communities, the world, and above all, to listen for the quiet that follows the inevitability of loss and resulting grief. Only then do we round the bend or reach the top to see the sunset after the storm.

If Siddhartha had the river, then perhaps the American of Venice has the Venetian canals. Still water, ever moving, whispering truths.

The American of Venice