Steppenwolf
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4.5 • 10 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A new translation by David Horrocks.
At first sight Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters - accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe and the bewitching Hermione - the misanthropic Haller discovers a higher truth, and the possibility of happiness. This haunting portrayal of a man who feels he is half-human and half-wolf became a counterculture classic for a disaffected generation. Yet it is also a story of redemption, and an intricately-structured modernist masterpiece. This is the first new translation of Steppenwolf for over eighty years, returning to the fresh, authentic language of Hesse's original.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While it's good for a titter to picture Peter Weller in full RoboCop gear reading Hesse's classic novel of intellectual absorption with the primeval, it is not entirely necessary for full appreciation of his reading. Weller, who has a Midwestern folksy personability, reads Hesse less as a work of great literature than a philosophical manual, meant to be studied for personal improvement. Hesse can be forbidding, even for the teenage readers who often discover literature through him, so Weller wisely renders his novel familiar, comfortable and friendly. Currently wrapping up a Ph.D. at UCLA in Italian Renaissance art history, Weller has clearly been taking lessons in sounding professorial entirely apropos here.
