Steppenwolf

A New Translation | Hermann Hesse

De: Hermann Hesse

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The most dangerous novel Hermann Hesse ever wrote — and the one he almost didn't survive. This new translation restores its full strangeness.

Harry Haller is fifty years old, brilliant, and convinced he is two beings at war inside a single body: a cultivated man of letters and a wild wolf of the steppes, irreconcilable, exhausting each other. One night, instead of ending his life, he follows a stranger into a magic theater where the price of admission is your sanity — and where the self turns out to be not two things, but a thousand.

Published in 1927, Steppenwolf is Hesse's most formally daring work — part confessional novel, part philosophical treatise, part psychedelic hallucination before the word existed. It was misread as a suicide note, banned, embraced by the counterculture, and never since gone out of print. It is also one of the loneliest books ever written by someone who desperately wanted to be understood.

Harry Haller's Records — the autobiographical manuscript of a man on the edge: his boarding-house room, his solitude, his contempt for the bourgeois world he cannot stop inhabiting, his impossible longing for Mozart and for a woman named Hermine.

Treatise on the Steppenwolf — the strange pamphlet Harry receives from a stranger, which describes him with uncanny precision and proposes that the self is not a duality but a multitude. The philosophical heart of the novel, written as if Hesse himself were diagnosing his own condition from the outside.

✦ Complete and unabridged translation of the 1927 text, rendered into contemporary English without sacrificing the novel's tonal complexity.

This edition also includes:

✦ Translator's Note by Erato Press — on the particular challenges of translating Hesse's German prose, which moves between clinical precision and lyrical excess in ways that most translations have flattened.

✦ About the Author — a biographical essay tracing Hesse's path from Pietist seminary to Nobel Prize: his nervous breakdowns, his Jungian analysis, his flight to Switzerland, and the strange second life his work found among American readers in the 1960s.

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil ✦ Philosophical fiction that earns its ideas through narrative, not lecture ✦ Novels about the impossibility of being a thinking person in a world that doesn't ask for thought ✦ Demian, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund — and what comes after them

Harry Haller wanted to understand himself. Hesse knew that was already too much to ask — and wrote the novel anyway.