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A review by drjerry
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
5.0
This is a masterpiece. I hesitate to invoke the word, as it seems so readily applied to so many things that its true import has been worn blunt. Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Buddenbrooks, the first novel he published at the age of twenty-six. However I must concur with the opinion of the critics who deemed Doktor Faustus the novel that "Mann was meant to write" and which appeared almost five decades after his first.
It's not an easy tome to digest. I lived in Germany for about a decade and strove to absorb as much of its culture, its language, and its artistic history as I could. The text (which I read in English translation, my native tongue) is nevertheless dense and at times bewildering even for an initiate; it is layered with allusion and reference, at times as intricate as a tractatus of Kant and as fantastical as an engraving from Dürer.
The narrative weaves itself and liberally borrows from the artistic, philosophical, musical, and literary contributions of the German masters of centuries past -- Dürer, Bach, Hegel, Beethoven, and of course Goethe -- and its story is not only a modern retelling of the Faust myth, but it forms literary requiem for the intellectual history of the nation. It takes the form of a biography, written in first person by one who was a lifelong friend of the subject, but is interspersed with dispatches from the current events of 1944-45 -- breaking the literary fourth wall so to speak -- during which Endsieg promised the German Volk becomes their own bitter fate as they watch, paralyzed and despairing, as the Allied and Soviet forces advance on Berlin on all sides.
It's not an easy tome to digest. I lived in Germany for about a decade and strove to absorb as much of its culture, its language, and its artistic history as I could. The text (which I read in English translation, my native tongue) is nevertheless dense and at times bewildering even for an initiate; it is layered with allusion and reference, at times as intricate as a tractatus of Kant and as fantastical as an engraving from Dürer.
The narrative weaves itself and liberally borrows from the artistic, philosophical, musical, and literary contributions of the German masters of centuries past -- Dürer, Bach, Hegel, Beethoven, and of course Goethe -- and its story is not only a modern retelling of the Faust myth, but it forms literary requiem for the intellectual history of the nation. It takes the form of a biography, written in first person by one who was a lifelong friend of the subject, but is interspersed with dispatches from the current events of 1944-45 -- breaking the literary fourth wall so to speak -- during which Endsieg promised the German Volk becomes their own bitter fate as they watch, paralyzed and despairing, as the Allied and Soviet forces advance on Berlin on all sides.