Steppenwolf is a book about a good boy turned bad, or rather an old man who has lived his life as a shy and anti-social man suddenly discovering the joys of youth in old age.
Harry Haller is a man who has resigned to fate. Sickly (gout) and suicidal, he doesn’t desire any joy anymore.
Haunted by the pain of gout, divorced from his wife and away from his children; he travels the world and is always far away from the merrymaking of every day.
He contemplates suicide every day. But a chance meeting with a lady, Hermine, in a bar changes the course of his outlook on life. For once, he rediscovers the joys of youth. What follows is a huge awakening which the book describes interestingly. You should read.
As a lover of philosophy and poetry, this book resonated with me from reading one part of a conversation
Strangely, the 253-page book has two chapters only. The conversation on page 178 about the existence is a winner.
‘Time and the world, money and power, belong to the small people, and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death’, Hermine says after a long philosophical monologue
‘Nothing else,’ Harry questions
‘Yes, eternity’, Hermine replies
“You mean a name, and fame with posterity?”
“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men
have been famous and known to posterity?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then it isn’t fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the schoolmasters. No, it isn’t fame. It is what I call eternity. The pious call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom of truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your great poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked wonders and suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity.”
I could go on and on, but this philosophical look at life is very deep.
The author is very poetic in his lines throughout the book. Other reviews and on the fact the preface contains descriptions that show or suggest that Harry Haller is indeed Herman Hesse.
He lived thus.
The author won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.
The Nobel Committee described the award decision as one that has come, “for his inspired writings which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style.”
The beauty of books is that one is transported to a time they existed not.
This one, first published in 1927, certainly does great magic to the philosophical and poetic soul.
Towards the end of the book, in impeccable descriptive English, Herman Hesse magically captures what I think is a mental trip into the ethereal, after ingesting some drug.
Whether Harry Haller is Herman Hesse, the debate is out there.
Did he commit suicide at the end, did he kill Hermine and escape to another town to die/kill himself?
