Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse (1927)
Der Steppenhipster
Our protagonist, Henry Haller, is introduced in a brief preface by Haller’s landlord’s nephew. The preface is largely expository and not all that interesting. This novel takes a good 100 pages before it really drags the reader in; that’s when I start finding more and more notes and dog-eared pages. Haller is plagued with a “sickness of the times.” At the end of the preface, the nephew tells us that the story is “an attempt to present the sickness itself in its actual manifestation. [It] means, literally, a journey through hell, a sometimes fearful, sometimes courageous journey through the class of a world whose souls dwell in darkness, a journey undertaken with the determination to go through hell from one end to the other, to give battle to chaos, and to suffer torture to the full.” I learned from Hesse’s 1961 forward to the novel that Continue reading
the self-hating hipster 