Steppenwolf

About the book

Harry Haller imagines himself as a creature split between cultivated humanity and an untamed wolf. His isolation, disgust with conventional society, and attraction to the comfort it offers make that self-description both powerful and unstable. Encounters with Hermine, Maria, and Pablo draw him towards pleasures and forms of companionship he has resisted. A mysterious treatise and the Magic Theatre push the book beyond ordinary confession into an exploration of competing selves. Hesse makes music, humour, and performance alternatives to the rigid divisions through which Harry explains his suffering. The novel does not offer a simple celebration of being an outsider. It asks what possibilities become visible when a person stops treating one tragic account of himself as the only available truth.

• Divided identity
• Isolation
• Art and transformation

Why read it

For an unsettling exploration of identity that subjects its own romantic image of the suffering outsider to sustained pressure.

English translation by Basil Creighton