Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game - A Novel

Ellen Loughran: Delivery was timely and book in very good condition.

United States on Aug 10, 2023

Vollie Stone: The Master writes about the Meister in a masterful way.

The smell of barbershops makes me sob out loud

United States on Jul 30, 2023

JohnnyT: Obviously, this review is about the author, not the particular publication ... though the publication is superb too. If you love Herman Hesse, you will love this novel. Hesse won the Nobel prize in literature for it in 1946. While not his most famous book (because it is quite "dense"), it is a masterpiece! At over 500 pages, it is rich, insightful, and masterfully written with a moving conclusion. Not for the casual reader, this serious novel offers remarkable insights into the joys and dangers of a narrowly focused intellectual life that excludes emotional sensitivity.

United States on Jun 13, 2023

mhachi: a lire

France on May 22, 2023

wrinkled weasel: People will not like this review but I have to be honest. Hess was popular with the hipsters and counterculture types in the Sixties and Seventies when, as a teenager I read works like Narziss und Goldmund. Coming back to Hess and The Glass Bead Game I just about got through a little over half the book and decided that life was too short for this. If one was cynical one might say this book was a colossal leg-pull, written to impress and confuse the impressionable (not to say gullible) and to convince its audience that the over-educated ramblings of an individual with 'issues' was a work of importance. But I will just say it is not a lot of fun and leave it at that.

Some would say that 'fun' is not always the point of a book and I agree, but on some level it must resonate with the reader, or the reader's interpretive community. As I look back at Hess with a gap of 50 years the goal posts have changed; we no longer look at Sgt Pepper as a psychedelic experience, destined to send us into a higher plane of existence, but just a very good album that in many ways changed the direction of popular music. We no longer think of Andy Warhol as a guru, but a kind of Sixties Banksy who...

United Kingdom on Aug 15, 2021

Greenstone: "The Glass Bead Game" reveals a distant galaxy within the Cosmos, a realm of thought adrift in the universe.

Author Herman Hesse stirred this ancient mind when searching life's meaning as a newly arrived member, just entering onto the world stage, literally.

Freedom of thought is a constant star sought for by the populations of the world, great and small, noted and insignificant. "The Glass Bead Game" challenges the reader to mount this distant plane page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, thought by thought.

A plateau of refuge for all who think, a respite for newcomers seeking the Everest of truth, found only in Jesus.

Far down and away on the slippery slopes of reality, as a young man I stumbled upon Hesse on the Emerald Isle, where reality clashes head-on with the mortal mind, directing the temporal person to eternal vestiges unseen.

Cleaving open the distant reaches of inter-communications, the author leads the way to the inner depths of connectivity intertwining the pursuits of all in journey of reason and the quest for peace.

Hesse's greatest accomplishment is the discovery of mutuality from the heights of...

United States on Nov 29, 2020

Shane K. Joseph: In this, his final, futuristic novel that also put the clincher on the Nobel, Hermann Hesse brings together all the themes he had developed individually in his previous books into a blockbuster, one that left me pondering the multiple illusion(s) in life.

First, the let’s take a look at the new world that Hesse ponderously builds up over the first 60 pages: Philosophy and Literature are out; Music, Mathematics and Meditation are in. The Age of the Feuilleton that we lived in has imploded, and scholarship has become a monastic calling. The unknown country in which this story takes place has decided to fund and house its academics in a province called Castalia. Castalians are free to pursue any branch of study for as long as they desire as perennial students. Castalia, in turn, offers the broader country its teachers. The crowning event in Castalia is the Glass Bead Game, one based on music and symbol, one that can be evolved indefinitely by writing new components into it, all of which are archived and integrated into the overall Game, a replacement to the arts that had fallen out of favour. The Game is conducted for a period of ten days annually, with trained gamers...

Canada on Jun 28, 2020

reader 451: The Glass Bead Game is set in an indeterminate future, a long time after the century of wars, also described as the age of the feuilleton, a time of shallow and fruitless individualism, our time. Scholarship has resumed its rightful place in society, a place at the same time of power and elevation and of humility before knowledge. And at its apex, or rather apart from it, are Castalia and a group of sister organisations which, around the world, practice the glass bead game. The game itself is not described, except that it is a play on a synthesis of science, music, and the arts, an attempt to touch at universal truths by sounding echoes between the disciplines. Its disciples, to match their dignity, vow celibacy and poverty much like the religious scholars of old, Western, Chinese, or Hindu.

The book is shaped as a bibliographical report from Castalia's own archives, complete with documentary attachments. This makes for a very slow pace, and for a whole that leaves much detail obscure. The Glass Bead Game is, voluntarily, tough-going up to well into its first half. It is as if Hesse scorns in advance his reader's expectations for an easy and entertaining piece, expectations...

United Kingdom on Sep 29, 2011

Russell Fanelli: The Glass Bead Game is divided into four distinct parts. Part 1, the general introduction to the game, is likely to be the least interesting to the general reader and may be skipped without concern that important information to understand the story will be lost. Part 2 is the fictional biography of Jospeph Knecht, the Magister Ludi of the title of the novel. As other reviewers have noted, the entertainment value of this biography is slight. The story starts slowly with Knecht's childhood and education and then moves to the point in the middle of the novel where he is appointed Magister Ludi (teacher of the game). I was interested in the various problems Knecht faced as Magister in the future world called Castalia. Knecht slowly moves toward enlightenment and we watch his steady progress. His journey becomes more interesting as he faces obstacles, not only with the ruling elite of Castalia, but also in himself. Everyone recognizes that Knecht is an extraordinary human being, but he challenges the status quo and has genuine concerns about the future of Castalia that not everyone wants to hear. The end of Knecht's story comes as an abrupt surprise to the reader.

Joseph...

United States on Sep 23, 2011

Emma: I first read 'The Glass Bead Game' in my late teens, and it left a lasting if vague impression. I very very rarely reread books - being of the opinion that life is just too short - but twenty-odd years later I felt compelled to revisit it, if only because I remember it being a very 'grand' and mysterious book, and because I could remember so little about it.

What a strange experience it was. I'm a lot older and a little wiser than I was back then, so the impression it made on me was less of awe and more of wonder. Specifically, I kept wondering why on earth Hesse wrote it? What, exactly, was its point? I found it maddeningly discursive, didactic, amibiguous - and yet nonetheless 'a great novel'.

That said, I could only imagine what a modern day agent or editor would make of it. There is little plot to speak of, and it's almost impossible to discern whether Hesse intended it as satire or homage or just plain narrative. The sudden and untimely end of the protagonist seems to leave the story in mid air, and then, almost as an afterthought, Hesse tags on three short stories, in the guise of Joseph's posthumous writings.

I found the novel fascinating, but its...

United Kingdom on May 11, 2009