Steppenwolf
April 13, 2008
"Steppenwolf" by Herman Hesse
Gardners Books 1999 paperback edition
A lonely intellectual, dissatisfied with his existence and contemplating suicide, rents some rooms in a new town. From this simple beginning, the novel follows the odd, mystical journey of a man into the depths of his own existence. He meets a young woman, his opposite in every way, who engages him in life again just enough to keep him going. Climaxing with a trip to the "Dream Theater" (a beautiful sequence that made the novel a hit among the 1960s counterculture) in which the protagonist indulges in arcane fantasies, learning his failings and moving on into a new path. The novel has been picked up perennially by morose youth as a testament from a intellectual outsider, but this particular readership generally misses the novel's more philosophical bent. The sense of loneliness is a problem to be worked through, not a state to be wallowed in. Though it has its faults, the novel is beautiful in its execution.
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