The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse (translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston) Vintage Classics. ISBN 978-0-099-28362-1. Fiction.
"One of the truly important books of the century, in any language." - The Times.
Hermann Karl Hesse was born in Calw, Württemberg, Germany in 1877.
As a protest against German militarism in the First World War he moved to Switzerland and lived there in self-imposed exile until his death in Montagnola, near Lugano, in 1962.
Hesse was influenced by his interest in music, the theories of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, and Eastern thought.
The novel was first published in Switzerland in 1943.
Hesse was on the German regime's list of banned authors and the book was not available in Germany until after the Second World War in 1946.
In the same year Hermann Hesse received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It is a name I have heard in some context but didn't know about him really Gwil.
ReplyDeleteId guess you've probably heard about him in connection with his Siddhartha - it's a novel about the life of Buddha.
DeleteIn 2001 ex-Beatle George Harrison and his wife Olivia bought a villa near Lugano in Switzerland. It was the house Hermann Hesse had lived in until his death in 1962.
DeleteHis grandparents on his mother's side had been missionaries in India. I believe he was influenced by their works in language. The book for your summer read sounds slightly Kafkaesque to me from what I have read of it.
ReplyDeleteIt could be a little Kafkaesque but that's fine since I'm living in the Republic of Kafkania. A famous leader of this land, a man called Sinowatz, said with a deep sigh - Everything is so frightfully complicated.
DeleteAnd it is.
I'm just at the end of the end of the introduction. Shall hopefully return to my place in Kafka's novel The Castle when I've finished this.
Thanks for the information about the grandparents. Most interesting.
I enjoy Hesse's books, he's the easist of the classic German writers to read in the original German.
ReplyDeleteHi Crafty,
DeleteI've read Siddartha and Narcissus und Goldmund in the original but Das Glasperlenspiel is beyond my limited abilities at the moment.
This translation by the Winstons is to my taste, and I'm really enjoying it.
Thomas Mann's Tod in Venedig is the easiest (for me) German Classic I've read in the original, so far.
I want to read that. I'm currently reading She Came to Stay (L'invité) by Simone de Beauvoir, alongside her Adieux to Sartre.
ReplyDeleteThanks D. I have to say that I'm enjoying it so far having read only 70 of the 520 pages. It's a good edition to have as the print is fairly large, which makes for pleasurable reading. I've never read Beauvoir. I'm reading Thomas Bernhard's Untergeher which is ostensibly about music and Glenn Gould, as it is smaller and I can carry it in my pocket. It has larger print with good contrast. That's something I look for these days.
DeleteLarger print with good contrast...I like a bit of that,too.
ReplyDeleteIt's very welcome.
DeleteI just read Simone de Beauvoir The Making of an Intellectual Woman by Tori More (I think that was her name). A sort of cross between a biography and a literary criticism of de Beauvoir's work and her position with Sartre. Not an easy read.
ReplyDeleteI take my hat off to you. Now for a red bush tea and some more Hesse. I'm on my way to the land of nod. On the radio they're talking Kafka. Ah, my better half has switched it off. That's a signal. Ciao!
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