This beautiful novel is an admirable attempt to synthesize what is the highest and noblest in human existence. If we analyze it carefully, we see that virtuosity, in its multiple faces, has been carefully distributed among the characters and the plot of the novel. A difficult task! and therefore worthy of the greatest appreciation. Structurally, the work is interesting for providing us with some very predictable lines and leaving some gaps in the story. This makes us reflect on the need for surprise when there is a harmonious whole expressing a deep and powerful message. In a narrative entirely steeped in this harmony, how much is to be gained by surprise? We notice in the work the honorable effort to give voice to the ineffable, to express through the simplicity and complexity of silence, music, and the starry sky, as if these elements needed no more than their own presence to tell us what they have to say. Joseph Knecht’s life ends in a scene of unforgettable symbolism: every detail contributes to the central message of the work. The radiant beauty of the landscape, the contrasts between youth and old age, instinct and rationality, health and disease, the simultaneously humble and courageous act of the schoolmaster who challenges and allows himself to be swallowed up by nature, all these, taken together, seem to tangent the complexity of life. For some reason, springs to mind the image of Hermann Hesse flying high, very high, in the same years when an army of authors was throwing literature into depravity…