This is a strange book. Written in the 1930s, it is set in the future, and in that it is similar to [b:Brave New World|5479|Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited|Aldous Huxley|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1331315450s/5479.jpg|39947767] by [a:Aldous Huxley|3487|Aldous Huxley|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1387374697p2/3487.jpg], which somehow seems to invite comparison. And there are comparisons, though these two eighty-year-old visions of the future are also very different. But both describe a hierarchical society. Huxley's book has a reservation for savages, those who do not fit in to the highly organised society of the civilised, where consumerism is taught from infancy.

In [b:The Glass Bead Game|16634|The Glass Bead Game|Hermann Hesse|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1386922806s/16634.jpg|2959456], however, the reservation is not for savages, but for intellectuals, who live in the province of Castalia, where they are free to engage in their intellectual pursuits, untroubled by the world outside. It is an all-male society of elite schools whose students are picked by the elite.

The main part of the book is the story of one of these elite students, Joseph Knecht, who rises through the ranks to become the Master of the epitome of Castalian society, the Glass Bead Game. The book begins with a history of the Glass Bead Game, which explains nothing about the game itself -- how it is played, or how one wins or loses. In the course of his schooling Joseph Knecht meets a fellow student from the outside world beyond Castalia, a world to which he returns for his holidays, and he alone is critical of Castalian society and its values. He points out that there is nothing creative about it. They study creations of people of the past, art, music and science, without studying the past itself which produced them. Joseph Knecht alone has an interest in history, to the study of which he was introduced during a visit to a Benedictine monastery.

At the end of the book are some poems and three short stories, said to have been written by Joseph Knecht himself. And the three short stories are better than the entire book.

I nearly didn't read the three short stories. I thought the book was long, and I carried on reading because I wanted to see what happened, but I tired of the two-dimensional description of a two-dimensional world. Yet the short stories are in fact an essential part of the book, and are the key to understanding the rest of the story.