Feb 13, 2016Barbara Lock rated it liked it · review of another edition
This is a tough one to rate.
For Hesse's wisdom: 5 stars
For Narrative Tension and Style: 2 stars
Executive Summary: really loved the gentle, therapeutic experience of reading, the themes, characters. The content keeps coming up in my mind as if the experiences had been mine. In many places there were important revelations, the kind that are most often experienced after years of a complex life and self-knowledge. Drawbacks: written in a detached biographical style, extremely wordy, and with little narrative tension. Easy to put down. It's as if Hesse was trying to jam as much life knowledge and self knowledge as he possibly could into a single story, and the narrative suffers.
In the story, after his precipitous retirement from the position of Magister Ludi (Master of the Glass Bead Game), the main character, Joseph Knecht, in speaking to his friend Deisgnori, alludes to a plan to take up writing (p. 415):