★★★☆☆ Like a biography of Beethoven for people who have never heard music

Das Glasperlenspiel

Hermann Hesse

I read Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel in 1984. (In English the title Das Glasperlenspiel would be "The Glass Bead Game", but you may find English translations under the title Magister Ludi, which is Latin for "Master of the Game".) I was at the time spending a year in West Germany. (It was still a divided nation -- the Todesstreifen separating us from East Germany was only a few miles away from where I lived.) I had the equivalent of a year of college German at Stanford, and to improve my Deutsch I read books.

Das Glasperlenspiel was easily the most difficult such book I read. The big problem in reading in a language that is new to you is that you read slowly. Das Glasperlenspiel is long, and no one would call it an exciting, fast-moving book. It made extraordinary demands on my patience, yet I still enjoyed it.

The edition I read began with an Introduction by some Hesse scholar, whose name I no longer remember. I particularly remember that the Introduction quoted a letter from Thomas Mann in which he warned Hesse that people wouldn't understand his humor. I certainly didn't. To me Das Glasperlenspiel seemed deadly serious. There was nothing in it to make me laugh. It's not that I didn't get the joke. (At least, I *think* I get the joke.) But from my perspective as an alien visitor from a different time and culture, it was the kind of labored joke that requires several layers of explanation. And after you've heard the explanations, you can say to yourself, "Yes, I can see, intellectually, how that is kind of funny." But not so as to laugh.

So, what IS the Glass Bead Game? You never really find out. First, it is clearly not a game like golf or even chess where two or more players contend against each other and one eventually emerges the winner. Rather, it is some sort of formal creative pursuit, like Classical Music or Theoretical Physics. There are clearly rules, but just as in music or physics it may be that creators are at their greatest when they change the rules. You imagine graduate students writing dissertations analyzing particularly famous past games, and professors publishing books. Indeed, the novel is structured as such a scholarly work, the life-story of one great Master.

I suspect that Hesse intended the Glasperlenspiel as a kind of parody or satire of art and academia. I can imagine that to him and Mann, the novel might contain specific references to their own time and culture that seemed very funny.

Das Glasperlenspiel is like a biography of Beethoven written for people who have never heard music, or of Einstein for people who have no understanding of physics or mathematics.

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