GLASS BEAD GAME - HERMANN HESSE

Been a while since I’ve read a novel like this, by which I mean, a classic, capital “N” Novel. The type about big ideas and clear allusion and metaphors without any postmodern trickery or playfulness. Something straightforward, a Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain is the book I kept thinking about when reading this, they’re incredibly similar) or Dostoevsky novel. I’ll get back to something weird soon but this was a nice little break. It’s a classic “college novel” but one I never read as a younger man. I’ve never read any Hesse actually. The book concerns a society sometime in the future where Europe has a province, called Castalia, which is focused on cultivating academic pursuits in a sort of monastic or classical university style. The people here don’t do any practical labor or engage in any real politics, they devote themselves to running boarding schools and training teachers and, especially, training players and teachers of the titular glass bead game. The game itself is never really spelled out, it seems to literally involve glass beads and to center around finding connections between different areas of study, say, between music and classical languages. So players have to be as erudite in as many fields as possible to be good at it. The novel follows one man (all the players are men, more on that later) as he grows up in the order and eventually becomes the magister ludi (game master). Since it’s a real “ideas novel” he has all these long conversations about the nature of learning and knowledge and whatnot with various people who represent different ideas. There are priests and guys really into Chinese philosophy, and outsiders who think the game is silly and other players and whatnot. The book has one of the funniest endings of any book I’ve read in a long time, which I will spoil here, in case you want to read the book for yourself. The main character slowly comes to believe that he must leave the ivory tower of his life as game master and engage with the real world to really give something back to humanity. He goes to be the tutor of the son of his friend who is not from the order and immediately drowns in a lake because he doesn’t really know anything about the real world. A very funny and abrupt ending for a book that took this character and idea of such a knowledge-priesthood very seriously. Definitely made me enjoy the book much more, before I was a bit turned off by the whole concept. I’m not huge on the idea of these peopel who seem kinda like parasites on society, they don’t really do or contribute anything and their game seems silly and inaccessible without dedicating your life to it. Characters occasionally brign this idea up but it usually gets glossed over, tho the ending acts as good commentary. Also, as I mentioned the book makes clear that only men are allowed in this order, and that the scholars are allowed to get pussy, but cannot marry, but this too is a bit of an aside. In reality, can you imagine how much boy-fucking would be going on in Castalia? A hierarchical, secretive, all-male society that takes young boys away from their families? It would make the catholic church blush. Anyway, a good, straight-forward story.