Steppenwolf     by Hermann Hesse, Translated by Basil Creighton Original title: Der Steppenwolf Original language: German Published by Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 218 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.56 x 8.32 x 5.48 ISBN: 0805012478 List Price: $13.00, £6.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.99 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1965 Format: Paperback, 253 pages Not available for ordering Published by Allen Lane Pub. Date: 1974 Format: Hardcover, 253 pages Not available for ordering

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Harry Haller, whose initials are suspiciously like the author’s, is a cultivated, sensitive outsider, a fifty year old having a kind of giant mid-life crisis. It’s not that he’s suddenly decided his life, or the world in general (‘this ravaged earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance’) is crapulous but that his violent internal contradictions are completely crushing his will to live. He feels that he has two beings inside him, the wolf of the steppes (the Steppenwolf of the title) and Harry the man, who each constrain and torment the other; neither allowing him to run free as wolf or live comfortably as a man. The wolf has made him resist the snares of bourgeois gentility but then he finds himself at the age of fifty a lonely man pottering around with his books, diaries and pictures stuck on the wall of his rented room...

Stepppenwolf is the extremely unpredictable and gripping story of how he gets out of this existential cul-de-sac, learns to tango, smoke dope, have the joy of beautiful women, become a real mensch. Obviously, it’s a trick worth learning and has made this one of Hesse’s cult books.

It’s also Hesse’s most structurally unorthodox book, getting away from his usual straightforward biographic narration. The Oriental, Freudian/Jungian and psychedelic paths to self-knowledge and self-liberation that Steppenwolf alludes to are represented in the structure of the story itself; Harry Haller’s personality is disassembled and reassembled before us in the climactic final section, the famous ‘Magic Theatre’. Because of this one could perhaps say that Steppenwolf is a book that is experienced as well as read.

The promise of the book to the reader is that if a stuffy, diffident albeit highly simpatico fifty year old can change his skin and discover the art of living then we should all listen up, instead of resigning ourselves to looking at life through grey-tinted spectacles.

‘The few capacities and pursuits in which I happened to be strong had occupied all my attention, and I had painted a picture of myself as a person who was in fact nothing more than a most refined and educated specialist in poetry, music and philosophy; and as such I had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities, instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrance and gave the label of Steppenwolf.’ p643