Word: ludi
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...MAGISTER LUDI (502 pp.)-Hermann Hesse-Holt...
When Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize in 1946, few U.S. readers had ever heard of him. Magister Ludi, his last and his greatest book, is not likely to make Hesse popular with them, but it will at least serve to give them an idea of what his dry, remote, ironic and highly individual writing amounts to. Hesse was born in Germany 72 years ago, wrote autobiographical novels and lyric poetry in his youth-he is considered one of the best German lyric poets since the age of Goethe -became a Swiss citizen during World War I in protest against...
...Magister Ludi has an underlying theme as savage as some of Jonathan Swift, but it is written in an elegant, leisurely, almost wearily lyrical prose. The combination is arresting. The book, laid in some remote and undefined future, purports to be a study of the career of one Joseph Knecht. Hesse is not so simple as to imagine that biographers in the future will write like those of the present. Many dates, names and places will mean little then, and many historical events nothing. This biographer of the future in the present rambles and rapturizes, leaves out everything a contemporary...
...opponent replied with a complementary phrase, or with one opposing it, or related to it, and the Game proceeded, with constantly deepening associations, with references more varied, subtle and ingenious. The greatest players became the leaders of the Order, and the greatest of all its central authority, the Magister Ludi (master of the Game), who was regarded by the members as almost...
...Order. He was an orphan, was chosen for one of the elite schools, joined the Order, spent two years in China trying to incorporate Chinese thought into the Game, was sent on a sort of exchange scholarship to a Benedictine monastery, and at 37 became the youngest Magister Ludi in the history of the Order. After reaching the greatest height of the Order, he left it, and tried to return to the world, hoping to become a village schoolteacher...