Born some time in the 23 rd or 24 th century, and soon thereafter recruited to join an elite schooling system that had become a sort of de facto international academe, Joseph rises through the ranks to become the Magister Ludi, or Master of the Game. The Glass Bead Game is a collection of fictional texts, the primary one being a biographical sketch of an individual by the name of Joseph Knecht. The following is a stream of consciousness meaningful only to those who have read Hesse’s masterpiece. I have purposefully refrained from reading its foreword and any other commentary to prevent the contamination of my thoughts.

What follows are my spoiler-laden reflections on this book.

To its credit, the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hermann Hesse in 1946, three years after the publication of The Glass Bead Game. But the book is still more than that, for it is in the broadest sense a human achievement, a testament to the intellectual health and vibrancy of our species. So sublime and so complete is his creation, that in my opinion it transcends literature to become simply an astounding artistic achievement, an example of what art can be, of what art ought to be. Its genius is not in its prose, but in the story and the fictional edifice that Hesse manages to erect.

My “review” of this book will be short: The Glass Bead Game is an astounding literary achievement. Thus begins The Glass Bead Game, a sprawling and monumental work of fiction by the German writer Hermann Hesse. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. … For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse.

The glass bead game review