L'Homme qui voulait changer le monde

The seven stories gathered in this volume illustrate, with great diversity of tone and style, the lasting modernity of Hermann Hesse.

From the short text “The Wolf”, written in 1903 and so emblematic of the future author of Steppenwolf, to “The Beggar” of 1948, Hesse constantly deepens his art and his thought. Kafkaesque in “If the War Goes on for Another Two Years” (1917), a forerunner of postmodernist irony in “A Tourist Town in the South of France” (1925), he is, above all, in “The Brothers of the Sun” (1904), “The Man Who Wanted to Change the World” (1910) and “Robert Aghion” (1912), the chronicler of the marginal being, the misfit, the perpetual outsider who cannot fit into the too narrow mould society offers him, and who carries within him a generous, if not spiritual, vision.