hokkie 's review for:

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
4.0
mysterious reflective medium-paced

Third hesse. Interesting to see it took me a month to read this. Demian took me two days. Read to: my little brown book on 🔂 by duke ellington & john coltrane. Some jazz thoughts in the early pages that made me ijbol bc ive literlly said the same things but about maga & hyperpop, and time is cyclical except sometimes youre a german man named hermann and sometimes youre an asian woman named hannah. Both love the act of meaningmaking (and also being ~80th percentile Annoying).

Yesterday cameron asked me if i was enjoying the book — i couldn’t say yes immediately, but it is true that i’ve been thinking about it all month. When i started it i was feeling particularly alienated. When you’re feeling alienated the most marginal and silly things make you feel like youre being split wide open and understood. It is almost certainly a bad sign when youre reading harry haller written by hermann hesse reading the pamphlet ‘treatise on the steppenwolf’ within the novel ‘steppenwolf’ being like woah thats so me and you’re also thinking woah thats so me. Why am i a man that has two legs, wears clothes, and is a human being, but neverthless is really a wolf of the steppes? I didnt even know what the steppes were before last month, when someone told me at a coffee shop without wifi, when talking about natural landscapes i’m drawn to. Is that kismet? The cursor that draws my moods and attentions, invisible to me, but certainly there.

I won’t talk about how i, in a fit of paranoia and indulgence, briefly became convinced that i was meant to be a man born in the 1900s grappling between german romanticism & modernism but that was certainly a thought for about 2 weeks and its a bit embarrassing perhaps. As my mood started to lift somehow the book transitioned into a theme that continued to be relevant — goethe chatting with harry in his dream and he has a levity that harry doesn’t and it pisses him tf awf. I love to laugh. Thats what makes me and harry different is that i love to laugh and harry just needs to have a freaking laugh. I almost certainly thought this was going to be a western siddhartha such that it was a three-part move, but somehow it absohtely wasnt, although it retained a lot of the images of fragmenting, eternity, multitude, and seeing the faces in the river. 

Max called me yesterday and bemoaned being a silly goose. Again, is that kismet? The thesis of this book is to be a bit of a silly goose. The last section of this book made me appreciate what it is i appreciate about nabokovs writings. That it can be anguish, and that anguish is so sweet. 

Also Increasingly convinced that hesse was just like. So insanely gay. Like why are you constantly writing about beautiful women that look like the strapping young men of the main character’s youth. Googling “hermann hesse gay” and google tells me he wasnt gay but he was. He was gay.

Items 4 your consideration: MadMen Only! (Angels Only!); binary, duality; rejection and asymmetry; fantasy and the eternals; cabaret and grotesquerie; im tired of baring my teeth so meet me at the steppes