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.

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