machine where he and a previously unmentioned childhood bud shoot up evil cars. Harry attends a costume party and descends into hell, which is the basement, and ends up tumbling through the doorways of his own mind, which includes an apocalyptic future of man vs. The middle third is where he looks to beautiful women to save him from himself. This makes the Steppenwolf’s mindset and belief that he is unique among fools more understandable at least. There is a chilling line where Hesse writes of ‘the holocaust to come’, years before it occurs. Now, it’s the late 20s and he sees WW2 coming and his countrypeople very rapidly falling in line with the nationalistic garbage that will launch it. The truth is that he was a German who lived through World War 1, while protesting it as wrong the whole way through. But, eventually, I did warm to Harry a bit. I wanted to mail him David Foster Wallace’s essay on mindfulness. This is the first third of Steppenwolf - how tortured a soul is Harry Haller, so much better than everyone else, and life among the bourgeois class is just so hard, might as well kill yourself as aesthetics demand. These thoughts morphed to incredulity when he surmises that the only reason the bourgeois class survives, given that they are so damn stupid, is people like HIM, wolves among the sheep. My thoughts around then were: What a fucking baby. Of especial annoyance was when Harry goes on at length about how much he detests the bourgeois but repeatedly takes advantage of the comfort bourgeois life provides for him. Instead, I was inclined to roll my eyes at his struggles, wherein he decries how hard it is to be intelligent and love Mozart in a world where people are generally not intelligent and love jazz (Hesse makes sure to toss in some overt racism while describing jazz). I did not identify with Harry Haller, the ‘Steppenwolf’, as many readers do, especially those who read this book much younger than I.

Steppenwolf goodreads