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A review by cellardoor10
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
3.0
I really enjoyed a decent amount of it, probably about 4 stars worth, but there was absolutely no way in hell this book needed to drag on this long. Just, why? How interesting could a dude who sits in an intellectual monastic order playing a game somewhere between trivia and chess actually be? For all the superlatives given him, Knecht is mostly pretty boring, and really, REALLY not worth this many pages of fictional biography. I still struggle to figure out how Hesse even filled this many pages? When I think back on what happened, I can't figure out what all that space was even used for.
Not a terrible book, but I was ready for it to make a graceful end and exit about halfway through. No idea why it didn't, other than Hesse liking the sound of his own voice, so to speak. And to have a ton of material after the character's death feels like flogging an already half-decomposed corpse. I do NOT care about his poetry unless it was relevant *during* the story. I don't care about his infantile ideas of other lives he could have lived - they could have easily been summarized to get the point across, rather than torturing an already exhausted reader with of this guy's sheltered life and ideas.
Not a terrible book, but I was ready for it to make a graceful end and exit about halfway through. No idea why it didn't, other than Hesse liking the sound of his own voice, so to speak. And to have a ton of material after the character's death feels like flogging an already half-decomposed corpse. I do NOT care about his poetry unless it was relevant *during* the story. I don't care about his infantile ideas of other lives he could have lived - they could have easily been summarized to get the point across, rather than torturing an already exhausted reader with of this guy's sheltered life and ideas.