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Title: Has its moments, ultimately kind of a mess though
Review: Much as I appreciate Hesse's cool tone and admire his ability to get to the root of so much internal emotional conflict with such honesty and sincerity, I thought Steppenwolf was kind of a mess. I felt like I had a measure of compassion for the characters in Demian and Siddartha, but Harry Haller's issues really just struck me as a needlessly melodramatic pity party, and this wasn't helped by the weird mystic/hallucinatory cabaret and imaginary conversations with Goethe and Mozart that Hesse sets him in. There are plenty of wonderful passages with smart observations about what it feels like to be at war within yourself, but there are just too many odd, unresolved images and scenes that in the end didn't seem to add up to much.
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