Steppenwolf in Never too Late to Read Classics

Jan 23, 2011 Yair Ben-Zvi rated it it was amazing

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I read this book at the very end of a very tumultuous stay and attempt at living life 'over' in Israel. It was discussed with a friend whom I had met in university and had become a brother to me as I had become to him, and he had recommended it to me for years. I had read Hesse's Siddhartha a few years previous, and I did like it very much, it was the most human telling of the soul's striving towards enlightenment that I'd read up until that point and up until now as well. But after a visit with I read this book at the very end of a very tumultuous stay and attempt at living life 'over' in Israel. It was discussed with a friend whom I had met in university and had become a brother to me as I had become to him, and he had recommended it to me for years. I had read Hesse's Siddhartha a few years previous, and I did like it very much, it was the most human telling of the soul's striving towards enlightenment that I'd read up until that point and up until now as well. But after a visit with my friend and brother in Estonia that, in many ways, served as a bookend to my Israel experience, my attempt, I read, or more devoured, the remainder of Steppenwolf I'd started in Israel.

And I'm glad, even further, I am changed because of it. I finished the book en route from Helsinki, Finland to New York, and when I reached the final line wherein Harry Haller the titular Steppenwolf loses 'the game' but is, paradoxically, stronger for being weaker, more whole for having been broken, and more stoic for having been forced to acknowledge the humor inherent in all tragedy and in all despair, and he is determined to do better the next time, I knew I hadn't so much as read the book as lived and breathed it in an ecstatic and agonizing panoply. I saw and felt the tortured mind and spirit and how it is cursed to be brought low to the deepest nadir of loss and pathetic tribulation but simultaneously its blessing in its potential to be elevated to the zenith of understanding and enlightenment that paradoxically again too few and too many can't understand either from fear, laziness, or simply contentment.

This is world class literature, this is necessary literature, this has to be read by everyone despite the repeated tagline and motif of it being 'not for everyone'. Along with the absrudism of Camus and the nihilism of Nietzsche and the anything of Kafka, this is a needed pain and an unexpected bliss. There are those out there who need to know that the life of the mind and the soul can, and often will, become much worse than it is now. But almost horribly, it is just as assured that it will become better, much better, so much so that you will hear the cold laughter and the eternal music of the immortals, and you will see, and maybe even believe in something as absurd and out of place as hope in the human soul. ...more

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