The Glass Bead Game

Before you is a book without which the entire culture of postmodernism in Europe—literature, cinema, theater—is unimaginable. What is it—a brilliant avant-garde novel stylized as a philosophy of surrealism, or a brilliant philosophical essay stylized as a surrealist novel? Perhaps now it doesn't really matter. What matters is this—years and decades go by, and there is still no end to the exquisite, painful, and esoteric "game of the glass beads." For such is the game that the best of mankind plays…