The Glass Bead Game by Hermann HesseMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Heard about this book from Robert De Nero’s character Dragma in The Bagman. Magister Ludi means Master of the Games so I had high expectations about some esoteric game of intellect – somewhat akin to Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games but without the action and the world-wide conflagration. Was quite disappointed; there was no edge-of-the-seat excitement of an actual game. No strategies or tactics about the game, not even like the sedate pace of a game of chess.
And certainly not any genre of SF!
A very wordy book – pages and pages of declamations and no real inkling about the so-called Glass Bead Game. It is about an exclusive men-only club on a provincial scale – a quasi-religious cabal of snooty self-proclaimed intellectuals. A misogynistic Masonic Lodge with an antipathy to all things feminine, the book has strong undercurrents of homosexual love pervading various ranks of the hierarchy of the sect.
Knowledge of Latin and German and European musical composers like Purcell would have made the book easier to read. May have been relevant in a past age
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