The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi)

Rating:
Summary: one of Hesse's best and that's saying a lot
Review: A college roommate recommended this to me in the late 60's. It led me to read a number of Hesse's books, but this remains one of my favorites. I was totally engrossed in the world of the novel and sorry when I came to the end of the book. Give it a try if you have never read it.

Rating:
Summary: Two worlds present in Hesse's work
Review: The Glass Bead Game should be required reading for anyone interested in the price of pursuing a "life of the mind." Bringing together all of the aspects of the aesthetic life in the growth of the main character (Knecht), the book asks the central question: shall one give up living in the world as a result? The demands of chasing wisdom while addressing the needs of day to day living pre-occupied Hesse throughout his literary life. This predominant theme of his work reaches its culmination in The Glass Bead Game. It is a novel of exrtaordinary beauty and life...few pieces have ever reached deeper into the wellsprings of what it means to be "alive in two worlds."

Rating:
Summary: Hesse's amazing forecast of our time and circumstances
Review: In this, probably the best book by Herman Hesse, the author shows an amazing ability to predict the difficulties of modern mankind. The focus on superficial matters, the lack of true human communication, the disregard for the basic values that plague today's environment are shown by Hesse as the raw material of the founding of Castalia, the spiritual order thant appears to save all knowledge and real feelings and to preserve it for the future generations. This book should be mandatory reading for every statesman, political leader, teacher, parent and everybody interested in the rescue of the real sense of human life. We all need the surging of a Castalia, and we need it right away!

Rating:
Summary: The Glass Bead Game: a Novel of Spiritual LIberation
Review: Awarded the Nobel prize for literature in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Geramn-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse came to embody the cultural and spiritual values nearly destroyed by National Socialism. Nowhere is Hesse's commitment to those values more clearly evident than in the late, valedictory novel The Glass Bead Game. A futuristic work set in the fictional Pedagogic Province of Castalia, the novel exhibits many of the virtues and some of the flaws of his earlier works. The themes of his earlier fiction are all there: The concern with individual liberty versus collective responsibility, the romantic conceit of the gifted individual adrift in a hostile environment, and the self-absorbing search for spiritual liberation. What distinguishes the Glass Bead Game is Hesse's mature vision of a society estranged from the creative sources of tension and change without which no true culture can hope to thrive. Castalia is a museum of the mind, the Glass Bead Game a travesty of creative activity. With gentle irony, the author portrays the ways of the monastic order which inhabits Castalia, dedicated to preserving the non-renewable resources of a fomerly rich and now baren cultural province. Hesse's lifelong fascination with Baroque music and non-Western ways of thought are clearly in evidence: The Masters play the music of Bach and Froberger, study the classics of Chinese philosophy, delve into the mysteries of the Medieval alchemists and practice meditation. Buth whereas these arcane pursuits provide the citizens of Castalia with no more than the elements of the game, they gradually lead Joseph Knecht, the Magister Ludi, to a realization of the ultimate sterility of the community which has nourished and sustained him almost from birth. His contacts with the strife-torn outside world (echoes of wartime Europe) no less than his own reflections prompt his resignation from the position of Master of the Game and his return to the outside world as a private tutor. In his letter of resignation he recalls the original meaning of the Latin word "magister": teacher. The need to impart knowledge in a practical, wordly sense heralds the beginning of Joseph Knecht's liberation, the liberation from the kind of alienated intellectual elite which stands idle as tyrants emerge to sway the masses to unspeakable acts of cruelty and devastation. That liberation is to end in Knecht's untimely death soon after his departure from the Pedagogic Province. Like his beloved music teacher, who in old age is unable to communicate save through an enigmatic smile, Knecht realizes that the end of all true creative activity is silence. Ultimately, the many pleasures afforded by a sympathetic reading of Hesse's novel are best summed up in the German word "Heiterkeit", used to describe the best qualities of Castalia and the Magister Ludi himself, a word meaning both cheerfulness and serenity.

Rating:
Summary: How it is read and not undrestood
Review: It is amazing how this book is read by so many and seems to have been missundrestood by most - as master himself has stated.

Rating:
Summary: A must-read of intelectual writing
Review: this is one of the books you must have read - of one of the most disregarded authors of our time. Just like his "Steppenwolf", this is a highlight of modern literature, comparable maybe with Umberto Eco's "Focault's Pendolum" or Cees Noteboom's "Rituals" (which I couldn't find at "Amazon.com" - odd!). The book requires time and concentration - but it will be worth every minute

Rating:
Summary: Promotion of The Gllass Bead Game
Review: I love this book. It is an amazing conglomeration of all of the great ideas of this time. I think that Hesse assimilates the most important scientific, logical, and artistic ideas of our times. He fuses the amazing formulae of the quantam physicists, interweaves the German conscience of science inherited from Goethe, and combines this with the logistics of the German scientific tradition, and lastly adds a philosophical distance and analysis of aesthetics and languages which is only a testament to the vast knowledge and experience that Hesse experienced through the early years of his life. I love this book, it's power is consuming and fills the reader with ideas of advanced societies, a new hope for humanity, the fate of ecation, and the grand hope in the realization of the unity of consciousness and the homogeneous essential core of all knowledge. Do not miss this

Rating:
Summary: Hesse's best...deep, thought-provoking, complex.
Review: This is by far Hesse's best work. A book to be read again and again. A wonderful story revolving around the life of a young boy who finds his own way, in a deeply structured society, and reaches the unwanted pinnacle of his "career". Hesse manages to create a character in Magister Ludi whom we can love, admire and sympathize with and still causes us to examine our own priorities and lifestyles. There is something new to be discovered with each re-reading of this treasure.

Rating:
Summary: The novel that changed my life
Review: I recently finished reading The Glass Bead Game for the second time, the first being when I began college in 1996. The first reading evoked an "awakening" experience, precisely as described -- this is not a coincidence -- in The Glass Bead Game and Hesse's autobiographical writings: my perception of the world, myself, and existence in general was forever altered. It was, to be sure, a mystical experience -- and not of the conventional variety. I expected my second reading, as with most books, to be less compelling, less significant. I also expected to discover aspects of the book that I disliked -- both in style and content. This, however, was not the case. The second read was equally as powerful; even after four years I can still feel the resonance of my first awakening experience. This novel has become, in a sense, my existential guide -- the only truly reliable source of wisdom that I have. Who else besides Hesse could bring together -- qua "rapprochement" -- the poles of modernism and, as I interpret it, the beginnings of postmodern thought? Like Hesse, Nietzsche is my shadow and Modernism my ideal -- together they form something wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: The ideal teacher in a decayed system
Review: This is a really important book that unfortunately has too often been misunderstood by both its supporters & detractors. I've been looking through all of the reviews to Hesse's "Glass Bead Game"(Magister Ludi), and one important theme that most have missed is the theme of education--an issue which Hesse has consistently introduced into his work from the very beginning, "Beneath the Wheel", to the end of his writing career. This book is, I believe, Hesse's exploration of what the ideal teacher (the magister) and ideal educational society (Castalia) should be like. However, it seems that through the course of writing about this ideal society, and writing from within it by using the masks of genre (i.e. Knecht's poems & writings), Hesse comes to the conclusion that even an ideal society is doomed to fail if the educational system ROTS from within. Seen in this light, the Glass Bead game, which many readers are disappointed to find only lightly sketched-out, is really not that important to the story; it's only a curiousity demonstrating the end-process of the Castalia system. The real issue is the methodology of teaching & the problems facing an ideal society that has lost touch with the real world. Indeed, Knecht admits that as he gets older he prefers to teach younger & younger students in order to reach them earlier. A hint that maybe all is not right with the process of educating those who become members of the "order". The book is, as many readers know, quite a feat of the imagination and a feat of literary mastery, but at it's heart are basic questions: how do we educate ourselves and others, how do we use what we've learned, and how do we balance the real world with the imagined world? These are difficult questions, but they are the ones that Hesse tries to solve with this book; the game itself is but a convenient vessel with which to explore these issues.