Das Glasperlenspiel

Hesse paints the picture of an utopian society in which an intellectual order has isolated themselves from regular life and dedicates themselves to a life of the mind. They are scholars and monks, they don't create, but research, retell and over-analyse subjects like math, music, philosophy. Their most precious tool is the glass bead game, the game the novel is titled after, yet whose rules are never truly explained. It is a game of association, of finding the similarities between different instances of beauty and order in life.

The first third of the book introduces you to its world and I truly got pulled in. The nature of the game is obviously quite fascinating (similar to all that can be read into games like chess and go). But then, the story slows down, and the protagonist's search for his true spirital and worldly destiny becomes overly preachy and parable-like. Like the scholars in the fictional Castalia that over-intellectualize - and probably spend their lives writing thousand-page reports transcribing other people's not-that-important conversations - the book becomes life-less and lengthy.

Parts of it also made me question Hesse stance on women. Era 1940ies. (Might just be a landmine I am not aware of). His book is practically devoid of women, in some way you could look at his utopian Castalia as an utopian brain-only androgynous society. But then he has one two women pop up in the end, very clearly representing love, lust, hate and war, and that theory doesn't sit well anymore...