His fellow monks study various subjects, but they are linked by a vaguely defined activity called the Glass Bead Game.

The Glass Bead Game is set in a distant, possibly post-apocalyptic future and tells the life story of Joseph Knecht, who at the beginning is a young initiate in Castalia, a monastic order of secular scholars. For a budding pseudo-intellectual like me, it was literary catnip. But it is singular: a genre blend of science fiction, fantasy, and fictional biography, leavened with musicology, poetry, and Hesse’s unique swirl of Eastern and Western philosophy (and, to be fair, the Nobel committee singled it out when it gave Hesse the prize for literature in 1946). It is not the best book of the era Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus are all better-and that’s just Thomas Mann. Very little stuck with me-what does, when you’re 17?-but the one book I return to repeatedly is Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. I was a horrible at it, but I fell in love with German culture, especially the modernist writers.

My high school required every student to take three years of a foreign language, so I took German. The city of Karlsruhe, Germany, also associates a Hermann Hesse prize.From the cover of the Hörverlag audio edition

In 1964, people founded the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis, awarded biennially, alternately to a German-language literary journal or to the translator of work of Hesse to a foreign language. Throughout Germany, people named many schools. Young Germans desiring a different and more 'natural' way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country, received enthusiastically Peter Camenzind, first great novel of Hesse. In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world worldwide fame only came later. Other best-known works of this poet, novelist, and painter include The Glass Bead Game, which, also known as Magister Ludi, explore a search of an individual for spirituality outside society. Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.

The glass bead game review