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The Glass Bead Game

by Hermann Hesse

4.04 · rating details · 5,559 ratings · 384 reviews

The final novel of Hermann Hesse, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature

Set in the 23rd century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellect...more

Paperback, 558 pages

Published December 6th 2002 by Picador (first published 1943)

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Jan 09, 2008

John rated it

Shelves: german, modern

This is Hesse's epic novel that tells the story of Joseph Knecht, a boy who passes through the system of the Castalian Order to become the Glass Bead Game Magister. If the last sentence made any sense to you, chances are you have already read the book. Though once the book is read, that is about all it is about. The book is written by an unknown member of the Castalian Order who is retelling the story of Joseph Knecht. The Glass Bead Game is an intellectual game played encompassing all major...more

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Dec 29, 2008

Joe rated it

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Shelves: top10

While Hesse's masterpiece has the same theme as Siddhartha, it's not the same short, simple work as that classic. Magister Ludi's inventive setting and method takes the basically unchanged storyline (gifted young man progressing, achieving, and finally discovering the true meaning of life), and creates a sort of historical biography of the protagonist.

One of the fun aspects of this work is The Glass Bead Game: he introduces an idea of representing ideas, mathematics, literature --...more

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Mar 12, 2008

Logan rated it

Shelves: fiction, philosophy, 1001-list

I feel that I must open this review by stating that I am an unabashed fanboy of Hermann Hesse. I read everything that he had ever written at a whirlwind pace several years ago and still return to my favorites, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha and Demian, on a rotating yearly basis. That said, I have often heard that The Glass Bead Game is the magnum opus of Hesse's career. The purest expression of the themes that he had highlighted in his other works. If one were to read only one book by Hesse it sho...more

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Apr 18, 2009

Robin Tell rated it

A tremendous disappointment, especially given the shimmering praise the book garners on all sides. I realize I’m at odds with the world in judging this book harshly, and I realize there may yet be some dimension of brilliance here that I’m just not seeing, but grant me this, it’s not for lack of trying. No other novel have I ever laid down without a backward glance within a few dozen pages of the end, certain at last that the great payoff for my eight hundred pages of patience was never going ...moreA tremendous disappointment, especially given the shimmering praise the book garners on all sides. I realize I’m at odds with the world in judging this book harshly, and I realize there may yet be some dimension of brilliance here that I’m just not seeing, but grant me this, it’s not for lack of trying. No other novel have I ever laid down without a backward glance within a few dozen pages of the end, certain at last that the great payoff for my eight hundred pages of patience was never going to come. Here’s the big plot spoiler: nothing at all happens in this book. Not “nothing” in a loaded, John Cage way, just nothing, as when the author cannot deliver on his heady promises but publishes a book anyhow. I actually think it’s kind of important to call bullshit on all the approbation the book receives.

The two fundamental failures in the book are its main character and its central device, the Game itself. Both failures are drearily total, and each is all the more of a letdown for the breathless, never-ending clamor of hype both within and without the book’s pages.

The book starts right out with the declaration of Joseph Knecht’s pivotal importance, as the greatest player the Game has ever had, after whose career the history of the Game could never be the same. This is repeated ceaselessly throughout, in narrative asides. Meanwhile, we watch a pleasant, unassuming, talented young boy as he is handpicked by a professor, becomes a promising student whose great potential is remarked on by everyone he meets, and moves on to become a professor at a young age. He is indeed the youngest ever to become Magister Ludi, so at least that should earn him a mention in the history books. We are told, I think precisely once, that when he runs a game, it’s a good one. And then he gets old; along the way he meets some people and has some conversations. And then he dies in a swimming accident, and then we riffle through some of his personal papers until the book is over. Even his youthful writings, a strange little coda to his own life story, echo the pattern of fervent affirmation of the importance of a character—plainly himself in thin disguise, but now being described, just as fawningly, in his own voice—who goes on to do nothing much.

If in fact Knecht ever does anything of greater historical importance than being generally agreeable and good at what he does, it is not told to us. His life is a dull blank, undeserving of a biography at all, especially when at least three other characters go by who might actually have made good reading. Consider the strangely beatified Music Master, whose unexpectedly mystical transcendence of humanity Knecht merely witnesses when it comes along late in the book; that might be worthy of history. Or Knecht’s boyhood rival, a fiery young student who leaves the academic world and is reunited with Knecht later on one of the protagonist’s vanishingly rare ventures outside his ivory tower; his relationship to the Game is complex and troubled, but this barely ruffles the surface of Knecht’s complacency. Or there is the Sinophile who draws Knecht into a dialogue with Chinese history and literature, who gets to deliver the book’s most interesting challenge: when Knecht seeks his assistance in bringing the symbology of the I Ching into the vocabulary of the Game (much easier, you’d think, than it would have been to encapsulate French poetry or organic chemistry, since the I Ching is already encoded in a set of symbols easily printed on beads), his new mentor smiles and says you can build a garden in the world, but good luck fitting the entire world inside your garden. What’s this? A character within the Glass Bead Game dismissing the Game itself as far lesser than some other symbol system? Here, now, we have the potential for a meaty examination of this Game thing, which we deserve after putting up with so much talk about it. But Knecht just shrugs and goes about his business, and there will be no exposition upon either system. Because the Game is the other aching nullity at the heart of the book; there’s nothing there.

Hesse was inspired to write, beyond doubt, by the legitimately awesome notion of the Game. He imagines a symbol system within which all academic disciplines can be encoded, and can interact with each other, like a conversion chart for all fields of knowledge. Within this system, all concepts are encoded on beads, and it seems any of them can meaningfully combine with any other, such that wild new ideas emerge in the interplay. Here is the complex discourse wherein some kind of game, some competition or contest, can flourish, a game of all human learning, ranging like lightning from one discipline to another, referencing everything. Only a rarefied kind of academic could hope to understand such a game, let alone play it competitively. And the book is set within the cloistered academy where these super-scholars are trained.

It’s a sweeping, fascinating idea. It’s enough, without adding much of anything else, to drive a really memorable short story. But Hesse wanted it to crown a towering edifice, worthy of the sense of weight and magnitude that was, in fact, only the subject of the idea rather than its dimensions. By which I mean: it was a vague little slip of an idea about something vast and weighty, rather than actually being a vast and weighty idea. But Hesse fooled himself, and in his excitement he determined to write a very long novel, and that was a mistake from which there could be no recovery.

The fatal problem is that Hesse wilts instantly before the task of filling in any kind of detail about what the game was and how it worked. He hasn’t a clue. Inspired by his book, several people have gone on to design more or less playable games to match their impressions of the game he only alludes to—you can find them on the internet if you look around—but he never does. And the more ambient suspense the author generates by promising a brilliant reality, without ever showing even a flickering corner of it, the worse the bland filler starts to smell when it all gets stale. Mind you, I know it’s too much to ask for him to generate a practical game that lives up to his vision. But we don’t need him to do that. He need only sketch some part of it, fill in a detail here and a detail there that his characters can make part of their workaday conversations. He does need to do something, though, and it needs to pass muster as at least a tantalizing beginning of the thing itself. One example, perhaps, of a specific bead that represents something from the science of biology; what is written or drawn on the bead? What might be one instance of that bead’s being played in answer to a bead representing some architectural concept? That would be enough. He makes frequent mention of music—indeed the deification of music, common among writers, is so relentless here as to become a minor problem in its own right—but no sign of how it relates to any other field. Of course, a writer needs to be able to let the reader fill in empty spaces that the story only sketches with spare gestures. But the gestures need to be the beginning of something worthy.

In the event, that one game—”composed” by Knecht during his tenure as Top Official in Gameland—gives us just enough detail to make clear, after most of the book has gone by, that what’s actually happening here is a solo show. Knecht has composed a complex exercise in advance, and now the other players are just acting it out, perhaps filling in some details at their own discretion but abiding by a predetermined structure. Our one glimpse of the practical nature of the game has all the fanfare of a whoopee cushion. The Game isn’t actually a game. Nobody's playing. There are no objectives. It’s some sort of abstruse, very quiet performance art.

A long book full of portentious self-promotion but with nothing to say. An elaborately wrapped present with no gift inside. A big fat nothing. Not the nothing of the Bhuddist, who longs for nothing and seeks it, but that of the Wizard of Oz—a nothing that noisily proclaims itself to be everything.(less)

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Dec 20, 2011

José-contemplates-Saturn's Aurora rated it

Shelves: german-lit

A good Tratactus on Society; on what distinguishes the normal ones from the elite ones.In Castalia, the Elite (or the Order) pursues the Games of the Mind and its cultivation.An elite member renounces material wealth....and embraces poverty to become a Mandarin of the Mind.That is what Joseph Knecht did.Ah!...at Castalia, they learn meditation (Hesse calls it,so appropriately,psychic hygiene)....and they're in the 23rd century.
Students of the Order,most often, renounce marriage; they are q...more

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Oct 13, 2010

Clark rated it

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This book was a really incredible meditation on accomplishment, ambition, finding peace and the breach between intellectuals and reality. Hesse creates a reality in which an intellectual elite has created an entire society that lives above and beyond the rest of the world playing an incredibly esoteric game that seeks to connect all knowledge as a series of symbols. There were a number of things that struck me in this world. First of all, the connections to modern science, with its own increasin...more

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Feb 23, 2009

Patrick rated it

I must admit that I am having a hell of a time digesting this one. I think I will get the negative stuff over with so I can move on to the the more positive aspects of this book. I am a big Hesse fan (esp. Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Narcissus & Goldmund) and I really wanted to give this one four stars instead of three. What stopped me was how much of a slog it ended up being. I have no problem with long books (or movies for that matter) but there needs to be some sort of justification for ...more

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Dec 14, 2011

Roberta rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: 2008

Questo romanzo di Hesse rappresenta la sua reazione al nazismo. Articolato in tre parti (l’introduzione del curatore – che spiega l’origine, la storia e la funzione del Giuoco; la vita del protagonista, Joseph Knecht; gli scritti da lui lasciati) il libro affronta infatti la problematica del rapporto dell’intellettuale con il nazismo e più in generale con la storia. La soluzione di Hesse è proprio la creazione di un regno dello spirito (la Castalia) che si contrapponga alla barbarie del mondo “s...more

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Oct 24, 2011

Guy rated it

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Shelves: science-fiction-and-fantasy

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I had an antipathy towards Castalia and hence the book from the beginning. I have always thought that there was something suspect about heaven, and so does Joseph Knecht. The Glass Bead Game (GBG) is like angels sitting around and singing... beautiful, but ultimately sterile. Stasis and absolute hierarchy; rebels seen as flawed and undesirable. The world of the GBG is like heaven: perfect. But perfection and time are incompatible. Perfection and change are incompatible. And there's the...moreI had an antipathy towards Castalia and hence the book from the beginning. I have always thought that there was something suspect about heaven, and so does Joseph Knecht. The Glass Bead Game (GBG) is like angels sitting around and singing... beautiful, but ultimately sterile. Stasis and absolute hierarchy; rebels seen as flawed and undesirable. The world of the GBG is like heaven: perfect. But perfection and time are incompatible. Perfection and change are incompatible. And there's the story in a nutshell.

The book invites being read as a religious parable (it is not perchance that the name of the main character is Joseph -- sterile "parent" of the Messiah). But "Knecht" means "servant", with the implication of unwilling servitude. And sympathy with Lucifer is expressed early. There is interesting complexity here....

Knecht's and the narrator's age is not just old, it is dead. Creation of art is forbidden, and the GBG does not change. The theoretical ability to express all possible knowledge does not mean that it will actually be done. Meditation is not doing. Often in the past men have believed that they knew everything... and they have always been wrong. I suspect the future will be no different.

The narrator is undermined from the outset: he frowns on individualism and praises subordination to the hierarchy, and then he writes a biography of an individual who does not subordinate himself. So, is this irony on the part of the narrator or the author? It seems to me that we are dealing here with authorial irony -- the narrator is too earnest and seemingly unaware of his flaws and inconsistencies. Not my favorite mode: I prefer my narrators to be somewhere between competent and omniscient....

The narrator writes from Knecht's future... how far is unclear. The root of Knecht's rebellion was his foresight that the Castalian "idyll" was threatened. And yet to judge by the narrator nothing has changed. Is there a gathering storm to which the narrator is blind, or did Knecht through his sacrifice avert the threats of his time, or was Knecht just wrong (unlikely, but an unavoidable alternative given the book's silence on this matter)? I understand Hesse's desire to provoke thought... but by giving no indication of any troubles either subsequent to Knecht and/or contemporaneous with the narrator he sort of undermines Knecht. Which I don't like, because I like Knecht.

Stephenson's Anathem is an homage to this book.

Maybe I just read it too late in life....(less)

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Sep 28, 2011

Katie rated it

This may be my favorite Hesse book. Hesse sculpts a world that I've always wished to live in: An academic institution, or rather monastery, that instills in the student a love of beauty and truth (rather reminiscent of St. John's). A place where intellectual rigor is aimed at the classics texts but tempered through meditation excercises. Hesse also warns against the danger of such a place, as if to say that it represents only one half of man's soul. And so we are always drawn to the messiness of...more

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Jul 01, 2011

Cassandra Silva rated it

Shelves: classics

Hmmmm. This book was ponderously interesting. A world is created but ever so lightly as to leave much to the readers imagination. The glass bead game (unless I missed something) never seems to be played in epic battle proportions as described in this book, its never openly laid out other than just the basic idea. There is no real description of the differences that make up the world outside of what the main character is experiencing. Does that make sense? Its like you get this massive narrative ...moreHmmmm. This book was ponderously interesting. A world is created but ever so lightly as to leave much to the readers imagination. The glass bead game (unless I missed something) never seems to be played in epic battle proportions as described in this book, its never openly laid out other than just the basic idea. There is no real description of the differences that make up the world outside of what the main character is experiencing. Does that make sense? Its like you get this massive narrative about this particular characters life that seems to have some sort of basic interesting plot line and yet the execution of that plot is so bizarre as to render it almost a side note. Its almost as if the plot isn't the point. Its the point behind the point. Get it? No its like uhhhhh. There is something else going on here. I think the author is trying to make statements about art and culture. He is makings statements about being on the outside of something you love and that is integrally part of yourself. Making a statement about manipulation? I don't honestly know. But the plot is obviously only hiding something and that much seems obvious, though it isn't "hit you in the face" obvious enough for the number of pages that went into the venture to actually discern if he is hiding one thing or many. I can see the relations to Siddhartha. I loved that and the ending with Ramma I thought was really well conceived although the entirety of the post humorous writings really threw me for a loop. I don't know it was like it had this epically amazing idea. The game itself is a beautiful and engaging idea, the world even is engaging but he focused nothing on it. Like I said it wasn't the point. The focus continually went back to the character. Perhaps "self" is the point? If someone felt like they really got this book I would love a discussion. Write me a message. The whole book felt like grasping to me. Maybe that was the point! Oh gosh, there are too many things this book could mean, maybe it is everything. Maybe this book contains the answers to the meaning of existence and I blew the exam.(less)

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Jun 21, 2011

Caroline Donaldson rated it

One of my favourite books. In particular, the introduction is extraordinarily thought-provoking in anticipating the inter-connectedness of the world post-internet. It takes place at an unspecified date, centuries into the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around the start of the 25th century. The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a ...more

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Jun 08, 2011

Sourabh Chatterji rated it

What is the book all about-
The glass bead game is not a work of literature, It is a work on philosophy. It deals (like siddahrtha) with the most common but recurring philosophical conflicts between mind & matter, between worldiness & renunciation, between fact & truth. In dealing with such conflicts hesse tries to arrive at a compromise or rather a synthesis & harmony between the opposites.(In fact Unity of the opposites is one of the many underlying themes that the book deals with). And ...moreWhat is the book all about-
The glass bead game is not a work of literature, It is a work on philosophy. It deals (like siddahrtha) with the most common but recurring philosophical conflicts between mind & matter, between worldiness & renunciation, between fact & truth. In dealing with such conflicts hesse tries to arrive at a compromise or rather a synthesis & harmony between the opposites.(In fact Unity of the opposites is one of the many underlying themes that the book deals with). And like other books of his he represents these two opposites through different characters .
First question that arises is "what is the glass bead game" after all.whenever we think about the cosmos , immediately into our mind comes the idea of the solar system with differnt planets rotating about the sun.They appear as glass beads or rather of whenever we think about the cosmos the entire universe apears to interspersed with beads of glasses(planets,stars, galaxies).These beads of glsses although they seem to be moving around chaotically ,are actually following certain rules.Scientific rules such as 'kepplers laws'or copernicus laws prove that.That is , in this chaos actually, there is a pattern.More so,this universe in the source and synthesis of all knowledge for whatever new knowledge a scientist or a sage is dicovering or experiencing ,all that knowledge exist in the universe 'a priori'.So when the author says that the glass bead game is the synthesis of all knowledge ,he means the cosmos . The term 'game' can be replaced with 'plan' or the scientific "laws" awhich the universe follows.
Castalia is the realm of the ideal mind, a part of the universe or the ultimate ,which contains all ts onknown knowledge which is inclined to "calmness" "order" discipline and sagacity duty conscience etc.Apart from facultiess such as mathematics music it also has the faculty which knows about he synthesis of all known filed of knowledge ie the glass bead game.Knetcht is the master of this game.Similarly other characters also represent other aspects of the mind and the world . For example pilinio represents the world . The interaction between pilinio & Knetcht represt the conflicts aforementioned.Tegalirius represents the most negative aspects of the mind thatis individuality and relenting to passions & that the departure of Knetcht(master of the game - that is who knows about the cosmic plan ,or who knows about synthesis of all knowledge) from castalia to the world represents the endavour as also the requirement of achieving that harmony of the opposites.And in this endavour lies the greatness of Hesse and his workbecause instead of writing an intellectual philosophical treatise appealing only to a select few, he made the endavour to deal with such a complex subjectin themost simple manner which appeals to all.
In my opinion Hesse supesedes kant and spinoza in these respects(less)

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Apr 26, 2011

David rated it

Shelves: favourite-books

Some books have themes so big that they stand out from all the millions of books ever written. Magister Ludi, or the Glass Bead Game is such a book for me.
Herman Hesse wanted to write a story that involves the essential ideals of learning with a puzzle that asks the reader to get involved.
Education is seen by many as some kind of punishment, a prison for innocent children who should be out in the world playing games. Hesse presents an institution that has mystery like Hogwarts has ...more

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Sep 20, 2010

Patrick Gibson rated it

Shelves: contemporary-literature

The ‘Game’ is the pinnacle of intelligence, wisdom and learning that the 23rd century Castalia has to offer. Students are plucked from their families and lives at a young age to become 'elite' pupils, gradually inducted into the Order and the Game to carry on the traditions and ceremonies of Castalia. The Order's purpose is two-fold: One, to protect the sanctity and accuracy of knowledge from the current time down to antiquity, and two, to showcase the talents and minds of the elite with dazzlin...moreThe ‘Game’ is the pinnacle of intelligence, wisdom and learning that the 23rd century Castalia has to offer. Students are plucked from their families and lives at a young age to become 'elite' pupils, gradually inducted into the Order and the Game to carry on the traditions and ceremonies of Castalia. The Order's purpose is two-fold: One, to protect the sanctity and accuracy of knowledge from the current time down to antiquity, and two, to showcase the talents and minds of the elite with dazzling, lengthy Glass Bead Games.
But there is a problem, and only Joseph Knecht, the Magister Ludi - Master of the Game and hero of the story - can see it. The Glass Bead Game, while being the summit of intellectual achievement, has no creativity, no ability to move beyond what it currently is. Philosophy, music, art, mathematics, sciences: all these are condensed into symbols representing, say, a piece by Bach or a mathematical equation. However, no new symbols are allowed, or if they are, the process is so mired in bureaucracy that it may as well be impossible.
We follow Joseph from childhood to Magister Ludi, and we learn through him what Castalia is and is capable of. A supreme intellect, his life culminates not in the appointment as Magister Ludi - as so many other great player's would consider it to be - but rather with his famous 'circular letter', addressed to the other members of the Board, highlighting his concerns with the Glass Bead Game.
The plot of the book is minimal, and we are all but told it at the very beginning. Rather, we are invited to take a look at this could be-world of Hesse's. Castalia, however, is not the entirety of the world, as much as the inhabitants would like to think. No, they are 'merely' an enclosed, fully-supported (but not self-supported) university like establishment, churning out works that may or may not have any real use outside of their walls.
At first, the book mercilessly attacks our time, with its commercialism, its way of turning men intelligent in one field into minor celebrities in another, its way of asking movie stars or musicians to comment on the state of the world even though there talents lie elsewhere, its way of putting wealth above all. It seems at times as though Hesse was caricaturing his own time, but the frightening thing is, in 2010, we have become this caricature. After this attack, the beauty of Castalia is revealed, as explained above. But then, as Joseph Knecht learns and discovers and becomes Magister Ludi, we learn that Castalia is not so important, not so wonderful, not so essential as first presented. It is difficult for him to accept this, but easier for us.
In the end, no solution is given. Hesse emphatically states that our present time is too shallow to be the answer, but so is the staid environment of Castalia. It is worth noticing that no character beyond Knecht has a personality; even his is poor. Females do not play a part, and there is no conflict. Is Hesse saying that a world without creativity becomes a lifeless, boring world capable of beauty but incapable of appreciation of this beauty?
(less)

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Sep 05, 2010

David rated it

Shelves: european-literature

Tedium, tedium, tedium....the Germans cannot do satire, parody, or the comic novel...not in the national character. Where's the ironic distance...the affected pauses, the nudge, the wink???? The Teutonic character is for philosophy, social realism, even fabulism (of a sort) but writing a satirical novel about the over-weening gravitas of an academic biographer and the fellow's subject....it's supposed to be funny but gets nowhere close to being this.

When I was a teenager, mid-teens, I ...more

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Mar 28, 2010

Nick rated it

Feel like I'll almost certainly be reading this again several times. Perhaps not just yet, but someday. And also reading more by Hesse.

Some collected quotes or so. I suppose you might consider it a little bit of a spoiler, if you pay attention.

22: They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles - or they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations ...more

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Feb 03, 2010

Joselito rated it

This is Harry Potter without its female characters, its magic and magicians. Here we have Castalia, a "province" [more like the seminaries of today:] where it population of masters and students devote themselves to studies, or to the "things of the mind". Outside of Castalia is the practical world [the world which most of us live in:] devoted to knowledge not for its own sake, but knowledge to better the physical aspects of living.

In Harry Potter, there's the batt...more

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Jan 24, 2009

Katie marked it as to-read

Shelves: hiatus

Ah, mentions of this book were woven into my dad's hilarious, recent tirade about difficult books that people pretend to read. So now, of course, I feel compelled to read the books he listed, and perhaps I'll pretend that I haven't read them.

Actually, I've been avoiding this book for years, though I completely adore Hesse.

We'll see how this goes.

(1/24 - new semester, heavy course load = putting all lengthy, deep reads aside for a while in favor of short fic...more

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Oct 18, 2007

Laura rated it

· review of another edition

If I had a choice, I would have given it 3.5 stars. It's a very good book.

Much of the book is about abstract thoughts, ideas... scholar philosophy... I can handle that for some amount of time, but not for so many pages.

The end of the main book and "the three lives" writings at the end were terrific, though. That made me wish I had paid more attention during the abstract parts of the book to make all the connections which I'm sure were there. Maybe I'll read the...more

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Dec 23, 2010

Robyn Blaber rated it

Shelves: philosophy, german-literature

When I started reading this tome I confess that I enjoyed what I saw. Every page is more unbelievable than the last. When I got near the middle, disappointment started to set in however and I was never able to shake it. I've read Hesse, specifically Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. I was moved and enlightened by both and as such was very ready to be similarly moved by The Glass Bead Game. Rather, I found it to be a seemingly never-ending 600 page round of fellatio to academia.

Those who...more

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Sep 04, 2009

Eric rated it

The Glass Bead Game is the least of all of the works by Hesse that I have have read. Set next to many of his other works, particularly Narcissus and Goldmund, it is atrocious. Hermann Hesse is certainly monomaniacal in his contemplations of human nature but the GBG is entirely recycled material presented with all the finesse of an expository sledgehammer. Rarely does something transpire that it's not mentioned three or four times in consecutive paragraphs. (Don't believe it? How many times ...more

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Mar 02, 2008

Paul rated it

I was disappointed when I re-read this book. I remembered it as very moving and very significant. Upon re-reading I found it tedious and preachy. Hesse is trying to write a new kind of novel, one based on ideas instead of conflict. He succeeds, but the end product is boring. I also was bothered by the assumption that the life of the mind was open only to men -- women are somehow not qualified to share the glorious world of ideas. Hrmph.

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Leslie this was a life changing book when I read it - I was 21 years old
I wonder how I'd react if I re-read it.
I'm almost afraid to find out.
...more
Mar 02, 2008 02:36pm

Paul Re-reading old books can be like that sometimes....
Mar 02, 2008 02:43pm

Daniel Hesse is German, and German society is intellectual, it is much more intellectual than American or English society. The idea of the fields of mathema...more
Jun 06, 2008 10:41am

May 24, 2009

Larry Gordon rated it

Considered Hermann Hesse's masterpiece, Magister Ludi blew me away when I first read it...but perhaps being a 22-year old card-carrying hippie at the time explained my fascination.

Set in a vague future, Joseph Knecht lived in Castalia, a utopian nation focused on lifelong intellectual and spiritual development. Each year, the most brilliant competed in the Glass Bead Game, in which contestants developed presentations integrating all areas of human thought and spirit. The Game is des...more

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Jun 01, 2007

Ben rated it

Recommends it for: anyone in a leadership role, aspiring to a leadership role, or interested in symbols and abstraction

This is my all-time favorite book. It combines two key themes for me: First, the role of the leader as a servant and second the idea of intellectual game-playing as a way to make meaning. His explorations and elaborations of those themes are perfect. I've read and enjoyed other books by Hesse, and I like the way he tells stories that span a person's entire life without missing the small details along the way. I think this is his masterpiece.

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Aug 01, 2010

Yngvild rated it

Shelves: science-fiction

After having read some of Hermann Hesse’s earlier books and not especially enjoyed them, The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel) was quite a surprise. At heart is the idea that anchoring society to a strong intellectual foundation will protect it against the brutal, power-hungry governments and semi-illiterate mass media of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Imagine a time when global power has moved to Asia and the West, no longer needing to sustain an expensive military-industrial comp...more

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Mar 27, 2009

Carmine rated it

A book that requires initial effort, but the rewards are great. Back in 1996 (or was it 1997?) I picked this hefty volume up dubiously, having read several of Hesse's other novels, including Sidhartha, Demian, and Steppenwolf, coming away disappointed after each (although for almost the entire length of the book I thought Steppenwolf was excellent, and was only discouraged by its conclusion). At the time I was involved in a book club: "Crash" by JG Ballard was the first book to read,...moreA book that requires initial effort, but the rewards are great. Back in 1996 (or was it 1997?) I picked this hefty volume up dubiously, having read several of Hesse's other novels, including Sidhartha, Demian, and Steppenwolf, coming away disappointed after each (although for almost the entire length of the book I thought Steppenwolf was excellent, and was only discouraged by its conclusion). At the time I was involved in a book club: "Crash" by JG Ballard was the first book to read, and this was the second. Unfortunately, this book precipitated the break-up of a friend of mine with his then girlfriend (they were also members of the club), and the rest of my friends, with one exception, found the book boring and decided to end the club right there. I was one of 2 to keep reading, and we both came to admire this novel in the end.

The Glass Bead Game begins with a somewhat pedantic introduction that bears little resemblance to the rest of the novel, which thereafter focuses on the life of Joseph Knecht, a student in a society of the future initially presented as utterly different from our own. This difference lies in the separation of intellectual and technological or economic pursuits, and so we follow Knecht as he grows up and joins the sect of leading thinkers in their own province, where they devote their energies to a life of the mind (symbolized by the Game of the title, a kind of amalgam of chess and music from what i can make out, though the game is not clearly explained). However, as the novel wears on it becomes clear that no such separation can happen for long, and as the more mundane encroaches on Knecht, who by the end of the book has become the leader of the intellectual movement, a personal crisis ensues.

This bare-bones plot summary doesn't convey the wonder of the book, which should fascinate anyone who's ever been interested in learning or has speculated on what a purely intellectual life might be like. Hesse presents all this with a lightness of touch that makes it all work, and the moving end of the book will resonate long after you finish. The disorder and calamity of the outside world are well represented by Knecht's friends who leave the retreat and then return, as adults, opening the door to chaos.

The book ends with 3 short stories attributed to Knecht, each taking place at different moments in time and each describing a moral or spiritual dilemma. An interesting way to end the novel.

Recommended for those who enjoy Hesse or who like novels of ideas. (less)

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Jul 26, 2011

John Harder added it

I read this novel 15 years ago and decided to jump back in the pool. I enjoyed it both times but the interceding years have cultivated a different perspective.

The protagonist, Joseph Knecht is blessed to live an intellectually privileged life within a cloistered community. Throughout the novel we are subtly exposed to the dichotomy of a world of pure intellectualism and the hard tacks of the real world. Ultimately we realize that one can not be divorced from the other. Joseph in various inca...more

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Jan 13, 2010

Billroberts is currently reading it

I'm reading this for the second time, I read it the first time when I was in college, in the early seventies. I have also done this with The Idiot by Dostoyevsky and War and Peace by Tolstoy, and a few others. Reading these for the second time as an older man brings for me an unexpected experiential perspective to, what as a younger man, was mostly a book of ideas. When I read The Idiot for the first time I thought most of the characters in the book were fantastic and extended, but when I read i...more

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Jan 07, 2012

Sam Law rated it

This is a wonderful piece of science fiction: a fictional biography of a great man in the future, filled with humorous asides and subtle jabs at the pretensions of academic biographies. The majority of the story deals with the a character who rises to be the master of the glass bead game, a highly intellectual art where the connections between all academic disciplines are made in an abstract symbolic language. Yet, this game which so fills the life of the monastic intellectual caste is found to ...more

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About Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His best known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) which explore an individual's search for spirituality outside society.

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Quotes from The Glass Bead Game

“What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward and isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout or wave their arms. But, I assure you, they are nevertheless, burning with subdued fires.” — 23 people liked it

“Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?”

The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.” — 9 people liked it

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