Herman Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game, is a fantastic book. Though perhaps an argument could be made that it is a veiled ideological autobiography of Hesse, the book is ostensibly the biography of Joseph Knecht, a notorious Magister Luddi in the cultural haven of Castalia. In his Hesse’s progressive education utopia, a Magister Luddi is the person in charge of the Glass Bead Game, which Hesse describes as being the symbolic representation and manipulation of all the cultural knowledge ever developed by the human species.

The book begins with a 30-page introduction to the game, followed by the 300+-page biography of Knecht, and concludes with three short stories that Knecht wrote in his mid-twenties/early-thirties.

Throughout, the reader is introduced into what it means to be an exemplary member of a rigid (though enlightened) order that is not unlike the Catholic priesthood, as well as what it means to be an individual who is dedicated to transcending beyond any particular moment. To put it in high-school English terms, it’s about the conflict between the individual and the collective, but it’s so much more than that, because Hesse’s supreme individual is a person who has dedicated himself completely to the collective.

Hesse’s style may seem pedantic at times, but that is part of the conceit of the book. The narrator is a scholar looking back on the life of the Magister Luddi, a life filled with legend and rumor, and he is trying to separate the truth from the fiction. The style allows Hesse to poke fun at the dry tone associated with most scholarly writing of the 20th century, making for an ironic presentation of a life that is too valuable to be appreciated by such a mind as the narrator’s.

That’s all I’m going to say about this book, except for the fact that I highly recommend it.