I was working on a post this afternoon when the computer shut down on me. The same thing happened again just now, hours later.
I'm going to try a third time to confirm that
Frybabe's literary sleuthing and clever deductions paid off.
It i Hermann Hesse, and the book is
The Glass Bead Game (Das Glaperlenspiel), also known as
Magister Ludi = the Mater of the Game.
The author was born in 1877 in Swabia, a province in southwestern Germany, the son of Protestant missionaries who had served in india under the aegis of a Mission Society based in Basel, Switzerland, where the family lived for several years before returning to the German city of Hesse's
his birth.
In 1923 Hesse became a citizen of Switzerland where he lived until his death in 1962 (in Montagnola, in the Italian-speaking Ticino region.)
in 1911 he took a long trip, alone, to India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Borneo, an Sumatra. He used his personal experiences when he wrote
Siddhartha. That book and his novels
Demian, published under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair, and
Steppenwolf were very popular in this country in the seventies. In the last twenty years of his life Hesse wrote shorter works, essays, critiques, memoirs and countless letters.
In Germany he was considered a "traitor" i Germany because of his outspoken pacifism.
The Glass Bead Game was rejected by a German publisher in 1931 and published in Switzerland in 1943. In 1946 the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
T
he Glass Bead Game contains many literary and political allusions but is harder to access than his other writings.
Thank you again for participating in thes quest to solve this puzzle.
I'm glad the computer did not act up again.
