Book Reviews - Review 274

(Qualifier: ages since I read this.)

This is Hesse's longest and most ambitious novel, but I would struggle really to recommend it. It is set in a fictional European country that, if I recall correctly, is built on vaguely feudal lines. There is the sense of great mysteries that lie in the hands of its elite class; meanwhile, social honour is attached to success in playing "the Glass Bead Game", which seems to be a bit like chess. Intriguing and intricate though the scenario seems at first, the "enlightenment" of the elite remains obscure, as do the nature and rules of the Glass Bead Game.

Das Glasperlenspiel is essentially a fantasy novel with literary pretentions. It seems to want to convey some kind of transcendent philosophical truth, but it succeeds in this neither analytically nor allusively. Eastern religion and gnosticism (Hesse was a friend of Carl Jung) may be in the mix somewhere, but who can say where? Does Hesse himself know what the message of the book is? One has one's doubts. To me, Das Glasperlenspiel felt like a Herculean imaginative exercise in search of an intellectual purpose. It has a certain naive charm that is characteristic of Hesse (hence three stars rather than two); but I held it, on balance, to be meretricious.