Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse(1927)
Extract
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength.
A man of fifty lives in a rented room and believes himself divided into two natures, one human and cultivated, the other savage and wolfish, prowling the margins of bourgeois life with a contempt that is also longing. Hermann Hesse published this novel in 1927, during the Weimar Republic's uneasy flowering, and its protagonist Harry Haller is both a portrait of spiritual crisis and a prophecy of the destruction that follows when a civilization cannot reconcile its opposing impulses. A mysterious woman named Hermine leads him into nightlife, jazz, and sensual abandon, and the Magic Theatre of the final pages dissolves the self into infinite configurations. The book insists that the soul is not a duality but a thousand-fold multiplicity.
If you loved this
Salinger writes the same disgust with the world, but Holden is seventeen where Harry Haller is fifty.
Dostoevsky's narrator is the original Steppenwolf: too intelligent for happiness, too proud for surrender.
Hesse takes the same spiritual crisis and resolves it by a river instead of in a magic theatre.