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Rating: Is it possible to start reading a book with a rather negative and bored judgment about it, and then drastically change your mind, feeling that the book has managed to open your eyes, make you reflect, captivate you? Well, that's exactly what happened to me.
I began to navigate the book, at first, with a rather unpleasant sense of estrangement: it didn't bore me, but I had the strange feeling that the book's message wasn't meant for me, that Steppenwolf's personality (personalities?) had no affinity with mine: so I read it quite slowly, even though the treatise on the "Steppenwolf" had already caught my attention at certain points (particularly the garden metaphor used to describe the varied aspects of personalities). So I was forcing myself to move forward, a bit tired of reading about Harry's solitude and kind of misanthropy... until the moment the protagonist meets Erminia. And from there, the book enchanted me: after the solipsism and self-pity, Harry became human, spoke, opened himself to life, to people, to pleasure. Finally, his life no longer focused only on the world of spirit, on Goethe and Mozart, but also opened to the senses (with Maria, for instance) and to life.
And I read it all in one breath, fascinated by the magic theater, the Immortals and their humor, eager above all to open myself to that "radio music of life", the one that allows you to overcome the dichotomy between reality and appearance, between time and eternity, impatient to play with the pawns of my "Self," exactly like Harry.
The book has nothing realistic, it can also be considered the banal delusion of a madman, yet it all seems so true, so deep... The book thus becomes a "reflection" in every sense: everything is actually based on a play of mirrors. So, it's in the mirror of the magic theater that Harry sees his infinite personalities, it's Erminia who constitutes a mirror to his own thoughts (and who also bears a great resemblance to Hermann, Harry's childhood friend, another mirror game - especially when you think that the author also bears the same name). Harry even speaks of himself repeatedly in the third person, referring to himself either as "Harry" or as "Steppenwolf," as if he were contemplating his image (an impression reinforced by the editor's note, an external look that gives his "vision" of the character). But the book becomes above all a mirror for the reader: because in the end, I no longer felt estranged from Harry's story. Although the political dimension wasn't what hit me the most, although I was fortunate not to find existence absurd and although I didn't know the icy solitude of the Steppenwolf, I realized that the reflection on the Self was music ("radio") to my ears, and that dreamlike-symbolic atmosphere (who is Erminia in the end? a figure of fate imparting orders to Harry? and Pablo? simple seductive musician or holder of truth through the theater's illusions?) had definitively enchanted me. It had been years since I read a work that hit me so deeply.
Yes, undoubtedly Steppenwolf recalls Siddhartha (were it not for the figure of the dominant woman who initiates the ignorant man to the pleasures of life, or for the search for one's Self); yet Steppenwolf has an edge: perhaps that atmosphere that oscillates between madness and clarity, or perhaps that distance, that "humor" that seduces me more than the solemn tone of the legend... or probably because I ended up loving Harry, discovering his human side, even though I felt him so alien to me at first: and I felt for him an incredible tenderness.
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