Le Loup des steppes

“Steppenwolf holds a place apart in the work of Hermann Hesse. It is among the most significant of his novels. It could be dated to today, so closely does the sickness of living it describes resemble the experiences of contemporary novelists. It is not excessive to say that it is the first existentialist novel.

Steppenwolf tells of the solitary, wholly spiritual adventure of a man who cannot manage to adapt to the world, separated from others both by his intellectual riches and by his emotional failings, and to whom women try, little by little, to teach the joys of the senses. This theme is renewed by the subtlety of the analysis and the beauty of the form.

Hermann Hesse created, after his own genius, an atmosphere in which the real and the fantastic become indistinguishable, in which the simplest episodes take on symbolic value, in which symbols merge with everyday life.

The author gave the book the form of a posthumous diary of the steppenwolf, a diary preceded by the account of the man who, according to the novel's fiction, delivers this confession to the public.”