I bought this book intrigued by the title and the concept. A game that is the totality of all human knowledge and uses all things from music to physics to literature. However I think that the translation lets it down somewhat. Rather than a game the process described in the book seems fairly rooted in the concept of music. The game itself is not played out between contestants but is rather a poetic juxtaposition of various threads of learning. The German Spielen means more like To Play and so the word spiel is more like a playing rather than Game.
So I was disappointed there. Also it was not a book that follows a contemporary narrative. At one point the narrator says that the book is not a hagiography but tells it from all sides. This is far from the truth, in all things the main character succeed and does superlatively. Any minor setbacks are cleared up within a few pages at most. Disappointing in the extreme when one is used to contemporary drama laden plots.
The Nietzschean leanings of Hesse are obvious. The district of Castalia with its elite schools and game college are just like a little country of Ubermen, supported, and in their eyes justly so, by the world around them. Able to concentrate purely on ever more esoteric analysis of all human learning. They don’t even do any further creation, no research, no experimentation, no theorizing, no new music, no new literature. It’s all very insular and self interested. At a couple of points it feels like it might be lampooning this or even trying to seriously show the delusion in this, but quickly the reader realizes that the author is quite committed to this. Maybe he wasn’t and it’s a great self contained novel written from the point of view of a committed Castalian, but from what I’ve heard of his other books it’s not too different in philosophy. He has a big mélange of eastern mysticism, Buddhism and Nietzschean lines of thought.
This would be an interesting book if there was a more normal narrative structure, some real drama and also an interesting actual game to set things to. A game is a wonderful literary method to introduce all sorts of tension and would be fun to write about.
