I am Der Bajazzo: I am Tonio Krueger, 05 Sep 2003
There. I admit it! I am the joker: I am Tonio Krueger. At times I am also Little Herr Friedemann, and Detlev Spinell and Gustav Aschenbach. Such is the psycological power of Thomas Mann to present the deepest insights of his protagonists. Each story is partly autobiographical and each story depicts love as seen from an outsider, sometimes fraught with pain, sometimes cosetted by tenderness.

These short stories - all from the early part of his career - will hopefully dig beneath your own preconceptions of what it means to be pained and rejected, and will therefore hopefully inspire you as it did me to be that little more charitable to fate and to unintentional cruelty.

A last word on style. Here you will see a craftsman at work where every word seems to have been examined in detail before being committed to paper. A joy to read. To use a (not wholly inappropriate) musical analogy, Thomas Mann is an author who embraces classic sonata or rondo forms, recapitulating words and phrases from earlier sections in a masterful way, and treats his themes to intense developments that provides immense satisfaction to this reader at least at the end of each story.

A novel but flawed approach, 16 Jul 2003
Studies of mortality in Italy are rarely written in such a literary style as this, and for this the author has to be commended. Instead of going for a general overview of the subject as it relates to the city in question, he has chosen to focus on an individual case, and it must be said that he does this very well. The writer is clearly blessed with artistic talent; some of the descriptive passages would not be out of place in a novel. From a scientific point of view, however, one cannot help feeling that the book would have benefited from some more general conclusions. Statistical evidence, for example, is non-existent. In this respect, it compares unfavourably with, for example, Doug Graves' 'When in Rome, Die as the Romans Do'. This is why the book rates only three stars, despite its undeniable readability.

For any paragon of self-discipline, 02 Dec 2002
Mann draws a painful distinction between artistic beauty and the sensual, erotic beauty which underpins the protagonist's downfall. At the beginning of the narrative, a paragon of self-discipline, by the end this successful writer of wide European acclaim has become a slave to his passions. The exploration of aethetic rationalism (clearly evoked by Nietzsche)is shocking in its revelation of the deadly consequences of an extreme of either passion for the sensual or for the rational. A brilliant read - a masterpiece!

I am Der Bajazzo: I am Tonio Krueger, 05 Sep 2003
There. I admit it! I am the joker: I am Tonio Krueger. At times I am also Little Herr Friedemann, and Detlev Spinell and Gustav Aschenbach. Such is the psycological power of Thomas Mann to present the deepest insights of his protagonists. Each story is partly autobiographical and each story depicts love as seen from an outsider, sometimes fraught with pain, sometimes cosetted by tenderness.

These short stories - all from the early part of his career - will hopefully dig beneath your own preconceptions of what it means to be pained and rejected, and will therefore hopefully inspire you as it did me to be that little more charitable to fate and to unintentional cruelty.

A last word on style. Here you will see a craftsman at work where every word seems to have been examined in detail before being committed to paper. A joy to read. To use a (not wholly inappropriate) musical analogy, Thomas Mann is an author who embraces classic sonata or rondo forms, recapitulating words and phrases from earlier sections in a masterful way, and treats his themes to intense developments that provides immense satisfaction to this reader at least at the end of each story.

A novel but flawed approach, 16 Jul 2003
Studies of mortality in Italy are rarely written in such a literary style as this, and for this the author has to be commended. Instead of going for a general overview of the subject as it relates to the city in question, he has chosen to focus on an individual case, and it must be said that he does this very well. The writer is clearly blessed with artistic talent; some of the descriptive passages would not be out of place in a novel. From a scientific point of view, however, one cannot help feeling that the book would have benefited from some more general conclusions. Statistical evidence, for example, is non-existent. In this respect, it compares unfavourably with, for example, Doug Graves' 'When in Rome, Die as the Romans Do'. This is why the book rates only three stars, despite its undeniable readability.

For any paragon of self-discipline, 02 Dec 2002
Mann draws a painful distinction between artistic beauty and the sensual, erotic beauty which underpins the protagonist's downfall. At the beginning of the narrative, a paragon of self-discipline, by the end this successful writer of wide European acclaim has become a slave to his passions. The exploration of aethetic rationalism (clearly evoked by Nietzsche)is shocking in its revelation of the deadly consequences of an extreme of either passion for the sensual or for the rational. A brilliant read - a masterpiece!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!, 22 Jul 2008
At the risk of being labelled a Philistine, I declare that this book is one of the most insufferably boring tomes that has ever made it onto my bedside table. I admit that I only struggled my way through the first 170 pages, but that was enough to convince me that I should not waste any more minutes of my precious life wading through any more of this drivel.

I know, I have also been chastised for criticising modern art in the same way. Tracey Emin's "Unmade Bed" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" will just have to live in the pile of junk that I fail to understand.

I realise that I am in the minority, as most reviewers and professors of literature believe this to be a masterpiece, and probably the best book to come out of Germany in the twentieth century. Then again, Hans Christian Anderson's boy who recognised the nakedness of his Emperor as those around him admired the splendour and wonderful colours of their leader's new clothes, was also in the minority.

Perhaps, then, I shouldn't feel too bad about my opinion of this amazing piece of creative writing. It may also explain why English literature was the only `O' Level that I failed, despite having been a prolific reader all of my life. It just happened that the books that were chosen for my studies for those exams also bored me to tears.


A beautiful work of art , 26 Feb 2008
I've just finished reading The Magic Mountain this morning and I closed it with a smile on my face, having had one of the most rewarding literary experiences of my life. With it primary letimotifs of time, death and love, this wonderfully written and strange, magical book is worth every cent of your money and minute of your time. Nobody has written so eloquently on the mystery of time as Thomas Mann in this book. In a weird way it reminded me of Ulysses, in that just when some mundane detail was being described minutely, suddenly a flourish of prose would arise so breathtaking as to almost force you to close the book and wallow in the beauty of what you have just read. A masterclass of literature.

somewhat clunking translation, 17 Mar 2006
This is a book quite unlike any other, and is likely to be a read you remember for the rest of your life, it's that impressive.
One of the most sriking features is the pace, which is very deliberate....and will no doubt frustrate many readers by seeming slow and focussing on what might appear as trivialities. However, it builds into a superb picture not just of the characters but of what they represent. All of pre-WW1 european society is represented along with the preoccupations of that time. As a doctor, i also enjoyed the medical aspects of the book, including the sick role and the power of a paternalistic medical profession.

My reasons for ascribing 3 stars are entirely related to the translation by lowe-porter...she herself apologises for the quality of the work in the preface. With a shiny new translation by john woods now available, please consider obtaining that version. I "jumped ship" after reading the first 200 pages of lowe-porter's version and found the woods version so much more enjoyable, the characters have lost their muffled voices.

Big. Very big., 17 May 2005
Aptly titled book this; it is indeed mountainous - and not just in that it's huge. It is the Everest of books: it's a Herculean task to get try to conquer it but if you do the view is, to follow the metaphor, pretty spectacular. It's also entirely unlike anything I've read in just about any terms - the pace, the style, the narrative and the plot (or lack of it) are all as far as I know unique. Reading it isn't either laborious or fast-paced, I'd call it - in absence of a better word - luxurious; I found myself almost drifting through it, and at times it's no exaggeration to say I just found myself marvelling at the fluid, idea-strewn prose. Whilst it's probably not for the impatient, I still highly, highly reccommend it.

Magnificent and absorbing, 29 Apr 2002
Not only a gripping story with characters constructed in the finest detail, but also an intense meditation on the passing of time. My eagerness to read the next chapter was constantly in conflict with my desire to pause and think over what I had read so far. Persevere with it - the pace is slow to begin with - because if you like books filled with ideas, you really will be missing out if you don't give it a chance.

I am Der Bajazzo: I am Tonio Krueger, 05 Sep 2003
There. I admit it! I am the joker: I am Tonio Krueger. At times I am also Little Herr Friedemann, and Detlev Spinell and Gustav Aschenbach. Such is the psycological power of Thomas Mann to present the deepest insights of his protagonists. Each story is partly autobiographical and each story depicts love as seen from an outsider, sometimes fraught with pain, sometimes cosetted by tenderness.

These short stories - all from the early part of his career - will hopefully dig beneath your own preconceptions of what it means to be pained and rejected, and will therefore hopefully inspire you as it did me to be that little more charitable to fate and to unintentional cruelty.

A last word on style. Here you will see a craftsman at work where every word seems to have been examined in detail before being committed to paper. A joy to read. To use a (not wholly inappropriate) musical analogy, Thomas Mann is an author who embraces classic sonata or rondo forms, recapitulating words and phrases from earlier sections in a masterful way, and treats his themes to intense developments that provides immense satisfaction to this reader at least at the end of each story.

A novel but flawed approach, 16 Jul 2003
Studies of mortality in Italy are rarely written in such a literary style as this, and for this the author has to be commended. Instead of going for a general overview of the subject as it relates to the city in question, he has chosen to focus on an individual case, and it must be said that he does this very well. The writer is clearly blessed with artistic talent; some of the descriptive passages would not be out of place in a novel. From a scientific point of view, however, one cannot help feeling that the book would have benefited from some more general conclusions. Statistical evidence, for example, is non-existent. In this respect, it compares unfavourably with, for example, Doug Graves' 'When in Rome, Die as the Romans Do'. This is why the book rates only three stars, despite its undeniable readability.

For any paragon of self-discipline, 02 Dec 2002
Mann draws a painful distinction between artistic beauty and the sensual, erotic beauty which underpins the protagonist's downfall. At the beginning of the narrative, a paragon of self-discipline, by the end this successful writer of wide European acclaim has become a slave to his passions. The exploration of aethetic rationalism (clearly evoked by Nietzsche)is shocking in its revelation of the deadly consequences of an extreme of either passion for the sensual or for the rational. A brilliant read - a masterpiece!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!, 22 Jul 2008
At the risk of being labelled a Philistine, I declare that this book is one of the most insufferably boring tomes that has ever made it onto my bedside table. I admit that I only struggled my way through the first 170 pages, but that was enough to convince me that I should not waste any more minutes of my precious life wading through any more of this drivel.

I know, I have also been chastised for criticising modern art in the same way. Tracey Emin's "Unmade Bed" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" will just have to live in the pile of junk that I fail to understand.

I realise that I am in the minority, as most reviewers and professors of literature believe this to be a masterpiece, and probably the best book to come out of Germany in the twentieth century. Then again, Hans Christian Anderson's boy who recognised the nakedness of his Emperor as those around him admired the splendour and wonderful colours of their leader's new clothes, was also in the minority.

Perhaps, then, I shouldn't feel too bad about my opinion of this amazing piece of creative writing. It may also explain why English literature was the only `O' Level that I failed, despite having been a prolific reader all of my life. It just happened that the books that were chosen for my studies for those exams also bored me to tears.


A beautiful work of art , 26 Feb 2008
I've just finished reading The Magic Mountain this morning and I closed it with a smile on my face, having had one of the most rewarding literary experiences of my life. With it primary letimotifs of time, death and love, this wonderfully written and strange, magical book is worth every cent of your money and minute of your time. Nobody has written so eloquently on the mystery of time as Thomas Mann in this book. In a weird way it reminded me of Ulysses, in that just when some mundane detail was being described minutely, suddenly a flourish of prose would arise so breathtaking as to almost force you to close the book and wallow in the beauty of what you have just read. A masterclass of literature.

somewhat clunking translation, 17 Mar 2006
This is a book quite unlike any other, and is likely to be a read you remember for the rest of your life, it's that impressive.
One of the most sriking features is the pace, which is very deliberate....and will no doubt frustrate many readers by seeming slow and focussing on what might appear as trivialities. However, it builds into a superb picture not just of the characters but of what they represent. All of pre-WW1 european society is represented along with the preoccupations of that time. As a doctor, i also enjoyed the medical aspects of the book, including the sick role and the power of a paternalistic medical profession.

My reasons for ascribing 3 stars are entirely related to the translation by lowe-porter...she herself apologises for the quality of the work in the preface. With a shiny new translation by john woods now available, please consider obtaining that version. I "jumped ship" after reading the first 200 pages of lowe-porter's version and found the woods version so much more enjoyable, the characters have lost their muffled voices.

Big. Very big., 17 May 2005
Aptly titled book this; it is indeed mountainous - and not just in that it's huge. It is the Everest of books: it's a Herculean task to get try to conquer it but if you do the view is, to follow the metaphor, pretty spectacular. It's also entirely unlike anything I've read in just about any terms - the pace, the style, the narrative and the plot (or lack of it) are all as far as I know unique. Reading it isn't either laborious or fast-paced, I'd call it - in absence of a better word - luxurious; I found myself almost drifting through it, and at times it's no exaggeration to say I just found myself marvelling at the fluid, idea-strewn prose. Whilst it's probably not for the impatient, I still highly, highly reccommend it.

Magnificent and absorbing, 29 Apr 2002
Not only a gripping story with characters constructed in the finest detail, but also an intense meditation on the passing of time. My eagerness to read the next chapter was constantly in conflict with my desire to pause and think over what I had read so far. Persevere with it - the pace is slow to begin with - because if you like books filled with ideas, you really will be missing out if you don't give it a chance.

A timeless classic, 24 Jul 2003
Buddenbrooks is the last great classicalist novel. It tackles various themes, in the chronicling of a late-nineteenth century German borgeois family. Essesntially, like most, or all, of Mann's novels, it is the theme of decline which dominates, but the characterisation is truly inspired. As is the masterful control of language and observation. Really, it is Antonie's story, as she is the only one who actually survives from beginning to end, and in all honesty, she is the strongest and most beautifully drawn character. But little Hanno steals the show right at the last moment, a sort of prelude to Tonio Kroger as it were, with slight intimations to Faustus, and no doubt slightly an autoportrait. The technique of leitmotif which Mann borrowed from Wagner is most apparent in this novel, as is his love of Schopenhauer, and the novel overall reads as a deep and philosophically satisfying epic, though just as readable as any blockbuster family-novel of the modern day. The Porter translation is essential, as she spent her life following Mann and putting him into English.

sheer perfection....., 03 Aug 2002
i've read Buddenbrooks twice & hope to read it again a.s.a.p.(i'm
a voracious reader so finding time is a problem!!).Having initially read "The Magic Mountain" which i also enjoyed(though
found much of the philosophical stuff difficult),Buddenbrooks was
a revelation due to the sense of place,period & Mann's ability to
create characters i really cared about...but also,just a fine
story of the life & times of one 19th century family.Its written
with such clarity,elegance & assurance that i felt Mann was giv-
ing me the biography of his own forbears.
The leisurely pace,the attention to detail(such as dress,house-
furnishings,cuisine etc)& the varying individual traits of the
family members & other characters in the book all combined to give it a sparkle & vividness which i rarely find in most modern
fiction;it seems to me that writing of this calibre is now a
thing of the past,something to be lamented along with the passing of the times the author describes.
In these very different days in which we live,its truly a
pleasure to be transported by way of literature to a past which
has gone forever..though, thanks to Mann, still there to be
discovered & meditated upon.
Am i a romantic escapist? Well...i'd have to confess i am if its an escape to a milieu of this class & quality,one that makes
you sorry when you reach the final page.To me, a shimmering
jewel of a novel. If you havent read it, i hope i may have
persuaded you to do so...just a teeny little bit ?

Masterly insights into a period of social change., 17 Oct 2001
Buddenbrooks may look and sound to the prespective reader like a massive challenge, but Thomas Mann's first novel, published when he was 25, is remarkable for many things and not least of these is the ease with which it can be read.

Opening in 1835, it charts the lives of the Buddenbrooks through some 40 years, following the decline of this successful Hanseatic family. But Mann's magnum opus - it was cited on his 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature - is more than that: what it presents is a detailed and complex social view of a changing Germany, particularly taking in the turbulence of the revolutionary period around 1848 to the years after unification under Bismarck in 1871.

From a position of social and economic authority, the Buddenbrooks' confidence and power is overtaken by events around them until they are, finally, reduced to an insignificant echo of a former age. Their inability to move with the times, even though they are not incapable of seeing the changes around them, renders them impotent in the face of passing history.

The only Buddenbrook who survives is Antonie... not because of her flexibility however, but precisely because her childlike petulance and unquestioning faith in the status quo allows her to maintain her arrogant assumptions about the social position of the family and, therefore, her own role within it. And yet this belligerent refusal to move forward is a major factor in the family's decline.

Buddenbrooks also works so well because of Mann's dispassionate portrayal of his characters and their disappearing world. His gentle irony, particularly in terms of dealing with religion, provides the reader with a constant intellectual challenge. And, while it was first published in 1901, this is a book that never feels dated.

A little knowledge of 19th century German history helps, but is not essential to enjoying this absolutely superb novel.

Generation by Generation, 25 Apr 1999
(John E. Woods' new translation is highly regarded. For me, the tone of it seems a bit too contemporary for the text, but I presume it's a big advance over the previous translation which I haven't checked out.) Since this is a big complex multi-generational family saga of 730 pages, I figured I'd better draw up a list of characters as I read. However, after I had a list of about 75 characters, and sensing that there were hundreds more to come, I realized that such a list wasn't really necessary, for the book was written in such a way that it was very easy to remember who was who. This is an intimidating novel, but it turns out to be a surprisingly easy read. One also cares very much for the various characters, and has affection for them as if they were real, which they very well might have been. One is there when they are born, and when they are married, and when they die, generation by generation. It is amazing that Mann could have written such an ambitious book at such an early age (it was published in his 25th year), but it is much more than ambitious, it is very sophisticated, and very wise and profound in many ways. This is a book that can teach anyone at any age many things about human nature, or if not teach at least remind and/or clarify. I certainly feel as if I was learning a lot about the kind of social milieu my grandparents grew up in. The novel doesn't attempt to tie every single one of its "loose ends" at the end, but it has a grace and elegance that is very compelling from beginning to end. The society it portrays, in Lubeck Germany during the 19th century, is not particularly attractive one, and it is not one which one feels nostalgic for. It is gone for ever, but one does not wish it back. Number 8 on the Fireside Reading Club "A"-List, read 2/20/96.

I am Der Bajazzo: I am Tonio Krueger, 05 Sep 2003
There. I admit it! I am the joker: I am Tonio Krueger. At times I am also Little Herr Friedemann, and Detlev Spinell and Gustav Aschenbach. Such is the psycological power of Thomas Mann to present the deepest insights of his protagonists. Each story is partly autobiographical and each story depicts love as seen from an outsider, sometimes fraught with pain, sometimes cosetted by tenderness.

These short stories - all from the early part of his career - will hopefully dig beneath your own preconceptions of what it means to be pained and rejected, and will therefore hopefully inspire you as it did me to be that little more charitable to fate and to unintentional cruelty.

A last word on style. Here you will see a craftsman at work where every word seems to have been examined in detail before being committed to paper. A joy to read. To use a (not wholly inappropriate) musical analogy, Thomas Mann is an author who embraces classic sonata or rondo forms, recapitulating words and phrases from earlier sections in a masterful way, and treats his themes to intense developments that provides immense satisfaction to this reader at least at the end of each story.

A novel but flawed approach, 16 Jul 2003
Studies of mortality in Italy are rarely written in such a literary style as this, and for this the author has to be commended. Instead of going for a general overview of the subject as it relates to the city in question, he has chosen to focus on an individual case, and it must be said that he does this very well. The writer is clearly blessed with artistic talent; some of the descriptive passages would not be out of place in a novel. From a scientific point of view, however, one cannot help feeling that the book would have benefited from some more general conclusions. Statistical evidence, for example, is non-existent. In this respect, it compares unfavourably with, for example, Doug Graves' 'When in Rome, Die as the Romans Do'. This is why the book rates only three stars, despite its undeniable readability.

For any paragon of self-discipline, 02 Dec 2002
Mann draws a painful distinction between artistic beauty and the sensual, erotic beauty which underpins the protagonist's downfall. At the beginning of the narrative, a paragon of self-discipline, by the end this successful writer of wide European acclaim has become a slave to his passions. The exploration of aethetic rationalism (clearly evoked by Nietzsche)is shocking in its revelation of the deadly consequences of an extreme of either passion for the sensual or for the rational. A brilliant read - a masterpiece!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!, 22 Jul 2008
At the risk of being labelled a Philistine, I declare that this book is one of the most insufferably boring tomes that has ever made it onto my bedside table. I admit that I only struggled my way through the first 170 pages, but that was enough to convince me that I should not waste any more minutes of my precious life wading through any more of this drivel.

I know, I have also been chastised for criticising modern art in the same way. Tracey Emin's "Unmade Bed" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" will just have to live in the pile of junk that I fail to understand.

I realise that I am in the minority, as most reviewers and professors of literature believe this to be a masterpiece, and probably the best book to come out of Germany in the twentieth century. Then again, Hans Christian Anderson's boy who recognised the nakedness of his Emperor as those around him admired the splendour and wonderful colours of their leader's new clothes, was also in the minority.

Perhaps, then, I shouldn't feel too bad about my opinion of this amazing piece of creative writing. It may also explain why English literature was the only `O' Level that I failed, despite having been a prolific reader all of my life. It just happened that the books that were chosen for my studies for those exams also bored me to tears.


A beautiful work of art , 26 Feb 2008
I've just finished reading The Magic Mountain this morning and I closed it with a smile on my face, having had one of the most rewarding literary experiences of my life. With it primary letimotifs of time, death and love, this wonderfully written and strange, magical book is worth every cent of your money and minute of your time. Nobody has written so eloquently on the mystery of time as Thomas Mann in this book. In a weird way it reminded me of Ulysses, in that just when some mundane detail was being described minutely, suddenly a flourish of prose would arise so breathtaking as to almost force you to close the book and wallow in the beauty of what you have just read. A masterclass of literature.

somewhat clunking translation, 17 Mar 2006
This is a book quite unlike any other, and is likely to be a read you remember for the rest of your life, it's that impressive.
One of the most sriking features is the pace, which is very deliberate....and will no doubt frustrate many readers by seeming slow and focussing on what might appear as trivialities. However, it builds into a superb picture not just of the characters but of what they represent. All of pre-WW1 european society is represented along with the preoccupations of that time. As a doctor, i also enjoyed the medical aspects of the book, including the sick role and the power of a paternalistic medical profession.

My reasons for ascribing 3 stars are entirely related to the translation by lowe-porter...she herself apologises for the quality of the work in the preface. With a shiny new translation by john woods now available, please consider obtaining that version. I "jumped ship" after reading the first 200 pages of lowe-porter's version and found the woods version so much more enjoyable, the characters have lost their muffled voices.

Big. Very big., 17 May 2005
Aptly titled book this; it is indeed mountainous - and not just in that it's huge. It is the Everest of books: it's a Herculean task to get try to conquer it but if you do the view is, to follow the metaphor, pretty spectacular. It's also entirely unlike anything I've read in just about any terms - the pace, the style, the narrative and the plot (or lack of it) are all as far as I know unique. Reading it isn't either laborious or fast-paced, I'd call it - in absence of a better word - luxurious; I found myself almost drifting through it, and at times it's no exaggeration to say I just found myself marvelling at the fluid, idea-strewn prose. Whilst it's probably not for the impatient, I still highly, highly reccommend it.

Magnificent and absorbing, 29 Apr 2002
Not only a gripping story with characters constructed in the finest detail, but also an intense meditation on the passing of time. My eagerness to read the next chapter was constantly in conflict with my desire to pause and think over what I had read so far. Persevere with it - the pace is slow to begin with - because if you like books filled with ideas, you really will be missing out if you don't give it a chance.

A timeless classic, 24 Jul 2003
Buddenbrooks is the last great classicalist novel. It tackles various themes, in the chronicling of a late-nineteenth century German borgeois family. Essesntially, like most, or all, of Mann's novels, it is the theme of decline which dominates, but the characterisation is truly inspired. As is the masterful control of language and observation. Really, it is Antonie's story, as she is the only one who actually survives from beginning to end, and in all honesty, she is the strongest and most beautifully drawn character. But little Hanno steals the show right at the last moment, a sort of prelude to Tonio Kroger as it were, with slight intimations to Faustus, and no doubt slightly an autoportrait. The technique of leitmotif which Mann borrowed from Wagner is most apparent in this novel, as is his love of Schopenhauer, and the novel overall reads as a deep and philosophically satisfying epic, though just as readable as any blockbuster family-novel of the modern day. The Porter translation is essential, as she spent her life following Mann and putting him into English.

sheer perfection....., 03 Aug 2002
i've read Buddenbrooks twice & hope to read it again a.s.a.p.(i'm
a voracious reader so finding time is a problem!!).Having initially read "The Magic Mountain" which i also enjoyed(though
found much of the philosophical stuff difficult),Buddenbrooks was
a revelation due to the sense of place,period & Mann's ability to
create characters i really cared about...but also,just a fine
story of the life & times of one 19th century family.Its written
with such clarity,elegance & assurance that i felt Mann was giv-
ing me the biography of his own forbears.
The leisurely pace,the attention to detail(such as dress,house-
furnishings,cuisine etc)& the varying individual traits of the
family members & other characters in the book all combined to give it a sparkle & vividness which i rarely find in most modern
fiction;it seems to me that writing of this calibre is now a
thing of the past,something to be lamented along with the passing of the times the author describes.
In these very different days in which we live,its truly a
pleasure to be transported by way of literature to a past which
has gone forever..though, thanks to Mann, still there to be
discovered & meditated upon.
Am i a romantic escapist? Well...i'd have to confess i am if its an escape to a milieu of this class & quality,one that makes
you sorry when you reach the final page.To me, a shimmering
jewel of a novel. If you havent read it, i hope i may have
persuaded you to do so...just a teeny little bit ?

Masterly insights into a period of social change., 17 Oct 2001
Buddenbrooks may look and sound to the prespective reader like a massive challenge, but Thomas Mann's first novel, published when he was 25, is remarkable for many things and not least of these is the ease with which it can be read.

Opening in 1835, it charts the lives of the Buddenbrooks through some 40 years, following the decline of this successful Hanseatic family. But Mann's magnum opus - it was cited on his 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature - is more than that: what it presents is a detailed and complex social view of a changing Germany, particularly taking in the turbulence of the revolutionary period around 1848 to the years after unification under Bismarck in 1871.

From a position of social and economic authority, the Buddenbrooks' confidence and power is overtaken by events around them until they are, finally, reduced to an insignificant echo of a former age. Their inability to move with the times, even though they are not incapable of seeing the changes around them, renders them impotent in the face of passing history.

The only Buddenbrook who survives is Antonie... not because of her flexibility however, but precisely because her childlike petulance and unquestioning faith in the status quo allows her to maintain her arrogant assumptions about the social position of the family and, therefore, her own role within it. And yet this belligerent refusal to move forward is a major factor in the family's decline.

Buddenbrooks also works so well because of Mann's dispassionate portrayal of his characters and their disappearing world. His gentle irony, particularly in terms of dealing with religion, provides the reader with a constant intellectual challenge. And, while it was first published in 1901, this is a book that never feels dated.

A little knowledge of 19th century German history helps, but is not essential to enjoying this absolutely superb novel.

Generation by Generation, 25 Apr 1999
(John E. Woods' new translation is highly regarded. For me, the tone of it seems a bit too contemporary for the text, but I presume it's a big advance over the previous translation which I haven't checked out.) Since this is a big complex multi-generational family saga of 730 pages, I figured I'd better draw up a list of characters as I read. However, after I had a list of about 75 characters, and sensing that there were hundreds more to come, I realized that such a list wasn't really necessary, for the book was written in such a way that it was very easy to remember who was who. This is an intimidating novel, but it turns out to be a surprisingly easy read. One also cares very much for the various characters, and has affection for them as if they were real, which they very well might have been. One is there when they are born, and when they are married, and when they die, generation by generation. It is amazing that Mann could have written such an ambitious book at such an early age (it was published in his 25th year), but it is much more than ambitious, it is very sophisticated, and very wise and profound in many ways. This is a book that can teach anyone at any age many things about human nature, or if not teach at least remind and/or clarify. I certainly feel as if I was learning a lot about the kind of social milieu my grandparents grew up in. The novel doesn't attempt to tie every single one of its "loose ends" at the end, but it has a grace and elegance that is very compelling from beginning to end. The society it portrays, in Lubeck Germany during the 19th century, is not particularly attractive one, and it is not one which one feels nostalgic for. It is gone for ever, but one does not wish it back. Number 8 on the Fireside Reading Club "A"-List, read 2/20/96.

Like Everest, some people just have to climb it, 22 Oct 2007
I have wanted to read this book for a long time, and decided to take the plunge on discovering this new translation by John E Woods. This is a monster of a book - at 854 closely typeset pages, it is going to take a long time to read - in my case, the best part of a month. My opinion on finishing is that if you like this sort of thing its tremendously rewarding, but even still its going to be a difficult read at times, and you will find that some of the dense philosophical dialogue will need to be skim-read if you are not going to get bogged down.

There are many think I liked about it:

- A unique setting and situation - the patients at a Swiss Sanatorium in the 77 years preceding World War 1;

- The closed world Mann creates with its obsessions and rivalries, its artificial manners and routines. This is a unique fictitious society, but one that is entirely credible in view of the situation its inhabitants find themselves in;

- The way it so perfectly captures the state of mind of the patients, their adaptation to their illness and the way they have found a community that accepts them as they are;

- The creation of a timeless world where months merge into one another and years pass without notice;

- The way the sanatorium is a microcosm of Europe in the early part of the 20th century, with all the national conflicts in the wider world being played out in this intense community of tuberculosis sufferers.

- The perfect descriptions of obsessive states of mind that can be developed in such situations, imaginary love affairs, supernatural occurrences, intense antagonisms on the one hand and alliances on the other.

On the downside, the characters in the novel are incredibly verbose. When they speak, they go on for pages, and you have to picture the other people in the conversations standing politely waiting for the speaker to finish before they launch off into their own equally dense replies. However, this is all part of Mann's creation of "timelessness", and if you want to read this book in a hurry you're going to miss the point.

The translation is modern and natural and while I do not read German, I suspect that the spirit of the author comes through the pages.

I am pleased to have read this and feel quite a sense of achievement. My only regret is that I felt the ending is a bit hurried (remarkable for this book!), and is not entirely satisfactory. However, undoubtedly a pillar of 20th century literature, this book should not be missed - if you have the time to read it.

Amazing but v. long., 25 May 2006
I confess I've not finished it, but for the first half I was spellbound. It seems to go off a bit when one of the characters starts givingvery long speeches, so it turns into a different kind of book. If you don't believe that a story about a TB sanitorium can be gripping - you're wrong.
But let me address one very strange thing about my copy, which raises an interesting point about translations. I read the English translation (from original German) but there's an absolutely key passage of the book in which the language switches to French for about six pages, and was left untranslated. Fortunately I can (just about) get by in French, but if one has an English translation, wouldn't it be best to translate all non-English passages, with some note as to the language they are in? Otherwise it's a bit of a swizz.

I am Der Bajazzo: I am Tonio Krueger, 05 Sep 2003
There. I admit it! I am the joker: I am Tonio Krueger. At times I am also Little Herr Friedemann, and Detlev Spinell and Gustav Aschenbach. Such is the psycological power of Thomas Mann to present the deepest insights of his protagonists. Each story is partly autobiographical and each story depicts love as seen from an outsider, sometimes fraught with pain, sometimes cosetted by tenderness.

These short stories - all from the early part of his career - will hopefully dig beneath your own preconceptions of what it means to be pained and rejected, and will therefore hopefully inspire you as it did me to be that little more charitable to fate and to unintentional cruelty.

A last word on style. Here you will see a craftsman at work where every word seems to have been examined in detail before being committed to paper. A joy to read. To use a (not wholly inappropriate) musical analogy, Thomas Mann is an author who embraces classic sonata or rondo forms, recapitulating words and phrases from earlier sections in a masterful way, and treats his themes to intense developments that provides immense satisfaction to this reader at least at the end of each story.

A novel but flawed approach, 16 Jul 2003
Studies of mortality in Italy are rarely written in such a literary style as this, and for this the author has to be commended. Instead of going for a general overview of the subject as it relates to the city in question, he has chosen to focus on an individual case, and it must be said that he does this very well. The writer is clearly blessed with artistic talent; some of the descriptive passages would not be out of place in a novel. From a scientific point of view, however, one cannot help feeling that the book would have benefited from some more general conclusions. Statistical evidence, for example, is non-existent. In this respect, it compares unfavourably with, for example, Doug Graves' 'When in Rome, Die as the Romans Do'. This is why the book rates only three stars, despite its undeniable readability.

For any paragon of self-discipline, 02 Dec 2002
Mann draws a painful distinction between artistic beauty and the sensual, erotic beauty which underpins the protagonist's downfall. At the beginning of the narrative, a paragon of self-discipline, by the end this successful writer of wide European acclaim has become a slave to his passions. The exploration of aethetic rationalism (clearly evoked by Nietzsche)is shocking in its revelation of the deadly consequences of an extreme of either passion for the sensual or for the rational. A brilliant read - a masterpiece!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!, 22 Jul 2008
At the risk of being labelled a Philistine, I declare that this book is one of the most insufferably boring tomes that has ever made it onto my bedside table. I admit that I only struggled my way through the first 170 pages, but that was enough to convince me that I should not waste any more minutes of my precious life wading through any more of this drivel.

I know, I have also been chastised for criticising modern art in the same way. Tracey Emin's "Unmade Bed" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" will just have to live in the pile of junk that I fail to understand.

I realise that I am in the minority, as most reviewers and professors of literature believe this to be a masterpiece, and probably the best book to come out of Germany in the twentieth century. Then again, Hans Christian Anderson's boy who recognised the nakedness of his Emperor as those around him admired the splendour and wonderful colours of their leader's new clothes, was also in the minority.

Perhaps, then, I shouldn't feel too bad about my opinion of this amazing piece of creative writing. It may also explain why English literature was the only `O' Level that I failed, despite having been a prolific reader all of my life. It just happened that the books that were chosen for my studies for those exams also bored me to tears.


A beautiful work of art , 26 Feb 2008
I've just finished reading The Magic Mountain this morning and I closed it with a smile on my face, having had one of the most rewarding literary experiences of my life. With it primary letimotifs of time, death and love, this wonderfully written and strange, magical book is worth every cent of your money and minute of your time. Nobody has written so eloquently on the mystery of time as Thomas Mann in this book. In a weird way it reminded me of Ulysses, in that just when some mundane detail was being described minutely, suddenly a flourish of prose would arise so breathtaking as to almost force you to close the book and wallow in the beauty of what you have just read. A masterclass of literature.

somewhat clunking translation, 17 Mar 2006
This is a book quite unlike any other, and is likely to be a read you remember for the rest of your life, it's that impressive.
One of the most sriking features is the pace, which is very deliberate....and will no doubt frustrate many readers by seeming slow and focussing on what might appear as trivialities. However, it builds into a superb picture not just of the characters but of what they represent. All of pre-WW1 european society is represented along with the preoccupations of that time. As a doctor, i also enjoyed the medical aspects of the book, including the sick role and the power of a paternalistic medical profession.

My reasons for ascribing 3 stars are entirely related to the translation by lowe-porter...she herself apologises for the quality of the work in the preface. With a shiny new translation by john woods now available, please consider obtaining that version. I "jumped ship" after reading the first 200 pages of lowe-porter's version and found the woods version so much more enjoyable, the characters have lost their muffled voices.

Big. Very big., 17 May 2005
Aptly titled book this; it is indeed mountainous - and not just in that it's huge. It is the Everest of books: it's a Herculean task to get try to conquer it but if you do the view is, to follow the metaphor, pretty spectacular. It's also entirely unlike anything I've read in just about any terms - the pace, the style, the narrative and the plot (or lack of it) are all as far as I know unique. Reading it isn't either laborious or fast-paced, I'd call it - in absence of a better word - luxurious; I found myself almost drifting through it, and at times it's no exaggeration to say I just found myself marvelling at the fluid, idea-strewn prose. Whilst it's probably not for the impatient, I still highly, highly reccommend it.

Magnificent and absorbing, 29 Apr 2002
Not only a gripping story with characters constructed in the finest detail, but also an intense meditation on the passing of time. My eagerness to read the next chapter was constantly in conflict with my desire to pause and think over what I had read so far. Persevere with it - the pace is slow to begin with - because if you like books filled with ideas, you really will be missing out if you don't give it a chance.

A timeless classic, 24 Jul 2003
Buddenbrooks is the last great classicalist novel. It tackles various themes, in the chronicling of a late-nineteenth century German borgeois family. Essesntially, like most, or all, of Mann's novels, it is the theme of decline which dominates, but the characterisation is truly inspired. As is the masterful control of language and observation. Really, it is Antonie's story, as she is the only one who actually survives from beginning to end, and in all honesty, she is the strongest and most beautifully drawn character. But little Hanno steals the show right at the last moment, a sort of prelude to Tonio Kroger as it were, with slight intimations to Faustus, and no doubt slightly an autoportrait. The technique of leitmotif which Mann borrowed from Wagner is most apparent in this novel, as is his love of Schopenhauer, and the novel overall reads as a deep and philosophically satisfying epic, though just as readable as any blockbuster family-novel of the modern day. The Porter translation is essential, as she spent her life following Mann and putting him into English.

sheer perfection....., 03 Aug 2002
i've read Buddenbrooks twice & hope to read it again a.s.a.p.(i'm
a voracious reader so finding time is a problem!!).Having initially read "The Magic Mountain" which i also enjoyed(though
found much of the philosophical stuff difficult),Buddenbrooks was
a revelation due to the sense of place,period & Mann's ability to
create characters i really cared about...but also,just a fine
story of the life & times of one 19th century family.Its written
with such clarity,elegance & assurance that i felt Mann was giv-
ing me the biography of his own forbears.
The leisurely pace,the attention to detail(such as dress,house-
furnishings,cuisine etc)& the varying individual traits of the
family members & other characters in the book all combined to give it a sparkle & vividness which i rarely find in most modern
fiction;it seems to me that writing of this calibre is now a
thing of the past,something to be lamented along with the passing of the times the author describes.
In these very different days in which we live,its truly a
pleasure to be transported by way of literature to a past which
has gone forever..though, thanks to Mann, still there to be
discovered & meditated upon.
Am i a romantic escapist? Well...i'd have to confess i am if its an escape to a milieu of this class & quality,one that makes
you sorry when you reach the final page.To me, a shimmering
jewel of a novel. If you havent read it, i hope i may have
persuaded you to do so...just a teeny little bit ?

Masterly insights into a period of social change., 17 Oct 2001
Buddenbrooks may look and sound to the prespective reader like a massive challenge, but Thomas Mann's first novel, published when he was 25, is remarkable for many things and not least of these is the ease with which it can be read.

Opening in 1835, it charts the lives of the Buddenbrooks through some 40 years, following the decline of this successful Hanseatic family. But Mann's magnum opus - it was cited on his 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature - is more than that: what it presents is a detailed and complex social view of a changing Germany, particularly taking in the turbulence of the revolutionary period around 1848 to the years after unification under Bismarck in 1871.

From a position of social and economic authority, the Buddenbrooks' confidence and power is overtaken by events around them until they are, finally, reduced to an insignificant echo of a former age. Their inability to move with the times, even though they are not incapable of seeing the changes around them, renders them impotent in the face of passing history.

The only Buddenbrook who survives is Antonie... not because of her flexibility however, but precisely because her childlike petulance and unquestioning faith in the status quo allows her to maintain her arrogant assumptions about the social position of the family and, therefore, her own role within it. And yet this belligerent refusal to move forward is a major factor in the family's decline.

Buddenbrooks also works so well because of Mann's dispassionate portrayal of his characters and their disappearing world. His gentle irony, particularly in terms of dealing with religion, provides the reader with a constant intellectual challenge. And, while it was first published in 1901, this is a book that never feels dated.

A little knowledge of 19th century German history helps, but is not essential to enjoying this absolutely superb novel.

Generation by Generation, 25 Apr 1999
(John E. Woods' new translation is highly regarded. For me, the tone of it seems a bit too contemporary for the text, but I presume it's a big advance over the previous translation which I haven't checked out.) Since this is a big complex multi-generational family saga of 730 pages, I figured I'd better draw up a list of characters as I read. However, after I had a list of about 75 characters, and sensing that there were hundreds more to come, I realized that such a list wasn't really necessary, for the book was written in such a way that it was very easy to remember who was who. This is an intimidating novel, but it turns out to be a surprisingly easy read. One also cares very much for the various characters, and has affection for them as if they were real, which they very well might have been. One is there when they are born, and when they are married, and when they die, generation by generation. It is amazing that Mann could have written such an ambitious book at such an early age (it was published in his 25th year), but it is much more than ambitious, it is very sophisticated, and very wise and profound in many ways. This is a book that can teach anyone at any age many things about human nature, or if not teach at least remind and/or clarify. I certainly feel as if I was learning a lot about the kind of social milieu my grandparents grew up in. The novel doesn't attempt to tie every single one of its "loose ends" at the end, but it has a grace and elegance that is very compelling from beginning to end. The society it portrays, in Lubeck Germany during the 19th century, is not particularly attractive one, and it is not one which one feels nostalgic for. It is gone for ever, but one does not wish it back. Number 8 on the Fireside Reading Club "A"-List, read 2/20/96.

Like Everest, some people just have to climb it, 22 Oct 2007
I have wanted to read this book for a long time, and decided to take the plunge on discovering this new translation by John E Woods. This is a monster of a book - at 854 closely typeset pages, it is going to take a long time to read - in my case, the best part of a month. My opinion on finishing is that if you like this sort of thing its tremendously rewarding, but even still its going to be a difficult read at times, and you will find that some of the dense philosophical dialogue will need to be skim-read if you are not going to get bogged down.

There are many think I liked about it:

- A unique setting and situation - the patients at a Swiss Sanatorium in the 77 years preceding World War 1;

- The closed world Mann creates with its obsessions and rivalries, its artificial manners and routines. This is a unique fictitious society, but one that is entirely credible in view of the situation its inhabitants find themselves in;

- The way it so perfectly captures the state of mind of the patients, their adaptation to their illness and the way they have found a community that accepts them as they are;

- The creation of a timeless world where months merge into one another and years pass without notice;

- The way the sanatorium is a microcosm of Europe in the early part of the 20th century, with all the national conflicts in the wider world being played out in this intense community of tuberculosis sufferers.

- The perfect descriptions of obsessive states of mind that can be developed in such situations, imaginary love affairs, supernatural occurrences, intense antagonisms on the one hand and alliances on the other.

On the downside, the characters in the novel are incredibly verbose. When they speak, they go on for pages, and you have to picture the other people in the conversations standing politely waiting for the speaker to finish before they launch off into their own equally dense replies. However, this is all part of Mann's creation of "timelessness", and if you want to read this book in a hurry you're going to miss the point.

The translation is modern and natural and while I do not read German, I suspect that the spirit of the author comes through the pages.

I am pleased to have read this and feel quite a sense of achievement. My only regret is that I felt the ending is a bit hurried (remarkable for this book!), and is not entirely satisfactory. However, undoubtedly a pillar of 20th century literature, this book should not be missed - if you have the time to read it.

Amazing but v. long., 25 May 2006
I confess I've not finished it, but for the first half I was spellbound. It seems to go off a bit when one of the characters starts givingvery long speeches, so it turns into a different kind of book. If you don't believe that a story about a TB sanitorium can be gripping - you're wrong.
But let me address one very strange thing about my copy, which raises an interesting point about translations. I read the English translation (from original German) but there's an absolutely key passage of the book in which the language switches to French for about six pages, and was left untranslated. Fortunately I can (just about) get by in French, but if one has an English translation, wouldn't it be best to translate all non-English passages, with some note as to the language they are in? Otherwise it's a bit of a swizz.

The destruction of genius portrayed - in an outstanding translation, 27 Apr 2008
I don't find Thomas Mann's books, such as Doctor Faustus at all easy to read. They are both long and highly complex, written not as a novel as such but to transmit a message, in this case, the similarities between the Faustus legend and the rise of Nazi Germany. However, I have been fortunate to read both this book and another major work of Mann, The Magic Mountain, in new translations by John E Woods which bring a clear and smooth passage through these undoubtedly great works of literature.

Dr Faustus is on the face of it, a fictional biography of Adrian Leverkuhn, a brilliant composer who came to fame in the 1920s and 30s. The biography is recorded by his life-long friend Dr Serenus Leitblom, who happens to have possession of Leverkuhn's journals including a secret manuscript, which comes to light about half way through the book, which gives an account of the terrible evening when Leverkuhn entered into a pact with the devil, to exchange his soul for 24 years of brilliant musical composition.

Dr Leitblom has a hard time of it with Adrian Leverkuhn, the friendship never achieving an easy intimacy, and several times there are references to Leverkuhn's refusal to use the personal pronoun with even his closest associates. He is unapproachable and isolated, and takes private rooms in a farmhouse, some distance from Munich. His almost hermit-like existence is relieved by train journeys into the city where he takes part in musical and philosophical soirees, described in some detail by Mann and showing his command of the most complex musical ideas.

Leverkuhn's music is rarely well-received, being appreciated by only a select band of critics, the message being that it is too rarified for the common concert-goer, but will eventually be vindicated by generations to come. The implication is that only listeners similarly in league with the devil would be able to appreciate its complex abstractions.

Dr Leitblom writes his biography during the dark days of 1944 when Germany's collapse was seen as inevitable, and the tragic destiny of Leverkuhn is contrasted with occasional short accounts of the unfolding disasters caused by allied bombing of the great cities of Germany and the breaches of its borders by invading armies. This gives the whole book an atmosphere of burning cities and the inevitable doom which awaits Leverkuhn all who sup at the devil's table, the final chapter being a revelatory denouement which shows the dark forces which have worked through Leverkuhn's music throughout his life.

By the time Mann wrote this book he was living in America and broadcasting radio messages into Germany criticizing the Nazi regime. Dr Faustus is in some ways Mann's ultimate critique of Nazism, something he had been fighting since its first appearance in the 1920s. Dr Faustus is not an easy read, far from it, but it is an important element of world literature and great piece of art in its own right which can only enrich the reader who perseveres with it.

The demonic forces in the human psyche, 19 Nov 2006
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann is a challenging work, monumental in conception. Many of its 525 pages are not easy to read, especially the ones dealing with the theory and history of music to those not familiar with this subject. The discussion of modern and classical music is inevitable as Adrian Leverkuhn, the main character in the book, is said to be a great composer.

This novel is said to an "allegory of the rise and fall of the Third Reich", but what does that actually mean? The way I understand it is that Mann asks himself the question, how is it that the nation which produced the sublime music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven also produced Hitler and the horrors of the Holocaust? His novel is an artistic attempt at finding an answer to this question. For this purpose, Mann makes use of the legend and myth of Faustus, the man who is said to have sold his soul to the Devil -Precarious territory to negotiate in an age when those of intellectual standing don't believe in the Devil. In Mann's balancing act he makes use of his narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, a close friend of Adrian. Zeitblom was born a Roman Catholic, but now considers himself a Humanist, whereas Adrian is born to a Lutheran family.

According to Zeitblom's account, Adrian firmly believes that he has sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the ability to compose great music. It is worth quoting Adrian's own words here: "It is an age when no work is to be done in pious sober fashion and by proper means, and art has grown impossible sans the Devil's aid and hellish fire beneath the kettle......art is stuck fast and grown too difficult and mocks its very self, that all has grown too difficult..." The age he is referring to is the period after the First World War when Germany is resentfully licking its wounds of defeat, and the despair and turmoil in that country provides the fertile soil for the rise of Nazism.

Zeitblom gives us a description of the last work composed by Adrian, an oratorio entitled The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus. He says that the climactic passage of this work could be described as an "Ode to Sorrow", a lamentation, in contrast to Beethoven's Ode to Joy. "There is no doubt that he wrote it with an eye to Beethoven's Ninth, as its counterpart in the most melancholy sense of the word." While Beethoven's symphony may be said to be religious in the conventional sense, Zeitblom suggests that Adrian's work is also religious in a different sense. "A work dealing with the Tempter, with apostasy, with damnation - how can it be anything but a religious work!"

Although Adrian completed this work in 1930, I think Zeitblom (and Mann) is suggesting that he foreshadowed the total destruction of Germany by writing this Lamentation. It is likely that Mann wants us to understand the myth of the Devil in the same way that Herman Melville did less consciously in Moby Dick. Many critics have felt that the Great White Whale represents God, while Captain Ahab is the Devil. In Mann's novel, Adrian is one of the few people living in that era who recognized the demonic forces at work in the human psyche. Those who deny these forces become True Nazis. A Nazi would never admit that he is doing the work of the Devil; he sees himself as a God-like being whose duty it is to purify the human race.

What is the relevance of this message for the 21st century? I think it is that those who are unaware of and deny the demonic forces within themselves become the unconscious instruments of these forces. However, Doctor Faustus is a great work of literature which depicts a concrete reality in the life of its characters, and there are likely to be many possible interpretations.


A Reckoning.,, 27 Apr 2005
"Yes ... we are lost. That is to say: the war is lost, but that means more than a lost military campaign, in fact it means that *we* are lost, lost is our substance and our soul, our faith and our history. It is over with Germany; ... an unnamable collapse, economical, political, moral and spiritual, in short, all-encompassing, is becoming apparent, - I don't want to have wished for what is looming, because it is despair, it is madness."*

Thus, the narrator of Thomas Mann's last completed and, I think, greatest novel sums up Germany's fate after the barbarities of national-socialism. But this is no mere character speaking: This is Mann himself - the erstwhile self-proclaimed "Unpolitical Man," condemned to watch the Nazi tyranny's horrors from the distance of his Californian exile, taking up the mighty pen that had gained him his Literature Nobel Prize and, through the voice of a narrator named Dr. Serenus Zeitbloom (in itself, supremely ironic comment on Mann's own circumstances) composing his final reckoning with the country he left when the Nazis came to power, and where he never returned to live, although he finally did leave the U.S. in 1952, driven out by McCarthyism.

According to his diaries, as early as 1904 Mann had the idea of using a composer's temptation by the devil (and thus, updating the Faustian legend, *the* quintessential theme of Germany's cultural history at least since the Middle Ages) to illustrate the corruption of art by evil. Seeing the country's intoxication with the glorious promises of Hitler and his henchmen, seeing all of German society fall under the spell of evil, including the "Bildungsbürgertum," the educated middle class considering itself guardians of Germany's cultural tradition (and for whose acceptance the dark-haired merchant's son without a university education struggled throughout his life, much as they bought his books), reviving that idea first conceived forty years earlier was a logical choice; now further inspired by the personalities of Arnold Schoenberg, whom Mann met in exile and whose twelve-tone scale became that of his novel's protagonist Adrian Leverkuehn, and Friedrich Nietzsche, with whose writings and personal fate Mann had been fascinated early on. Philosophically and musically, the novel is also influenced by critical theorist Theodor Adorno, with whom Mann entertained an in-depth epistolary dialogue.

Blending together musical theory, the decline of humanist philosophy, the rise of fascism and the powers of black magic (most of which Mann had already explored in earlier works like "The Magic Mountain" and, very pointedly, in the 1930 short story "Mario and the Magician"), "Doctor Faustus" is thus simultaneously a comment on the political developments, a warning, an attempt to come to grips with Germany's high-flying, yet so easily destructible philosophical and moral compass - and, masterfully construed though it is, a cry of despair in the face of utter madness. For while the novel is brimming with references to the better part of German (and European) cultural history, from the medieval "Faustus" tale to Goethe, Weber's "Freischuetz," Martin Luther, Protestantism, and Thuringia and Saxony as focal points of all things German, Mann's central point remains the parallel between his country's fate and that of his novel's protagonist, both ending in ruin and madness-induced stupor after their deal with the devil has run its evil course.

Unlike Goethe, who places his Faust's temptation at his tragedy's beginning, leaving no doubt about the event's physical reality, Mann even narratively lifts Leverkuehn's temptation into the realm of allegory and imagination, by splitting it into two incidents, whose combined effect will only come to fruition in the novel's final part. On neither occasion Zeitbloom, the narrator, is present; for both we thus have only Leverkuehn's own words. Yet, even the first account, a letter describing how the would-be composer is mischievously led to a brothel and falls under the spell of a prostitute, already intimates the evil to come, the venereal disease that will later constitute the outward cause of his madness; and not only does Leverkuehn ask his friend to destroy that letter, he also closes it imploring him to pray for his soul.

Much later in the narrative - although indicating that it was actually written earlier; thus employing yet another level of (temporal) abstraction - Mann introduces Leverkuehn's transcript of his exchange with the devil; a dream-like sequence during which shape-shifting "Sammael," in language hearkening back to Goethe and even the Middle Ages, promises Leverkuehn nothing short of "the metamorphosis of a god": that by his name a whole generation of "receptively healthy boys"* will swear, "those who thanks to [his] madness will no longer have to be mad themselves;"* and that, indeed, his name will live forever. Still, at this point we have already witnessed Leverkuehn explaining the foundations of his twelve-tone scale, only to be challenged by Zeitbloom's question whether the strictness of his concept doesn't deprive the composer of all freedom (which Leverkuehn denies, rather seeing the composer as "bound by a self-imposed order, hence free").* And when in an exchange laden with symbolism Zeitbloom then presses whether the formation of harmony wouldn't be left to chance, Leverkuehn's response is, "Rather say: to constellation"* - thus squarely introducing, as his friend will quickly note, concepts of black magic, which in addition to the dialogue's musical and political references again drive home Leverkuehn's exposure to the irrational and evil, long before the reader actually learns about his interview with the devil.

Doubtlessly among Mann's most intimately personal works, "Doctor Faustus" is also among his most complex ones; and while hardly any of his writings make for a leisurely read, the sardonic "Felix Krull," the near-humoristic "Royal Highness" and even his early masterpiece "Buddenbrooks" are foils to the older master craftsman's rapier that is drawn here. Demanding, certainly - but also highly recommended!
_______________________________

*Translation mine.
_______________________________

Bob Zeidler, in friendship and grateful memory of an exchange that partly inspired the above. Bob's comments thereon are sorely missed.

Perfection of form, 24 Jul 2003
Well, what can you say? If Felix Krull is the novel that would have perfected Mann's form, Faustus was the one which actually did. The technicality of language and construction of novelistic technique here is like Nabokov tenfold. It is unsurpassed, even by Proust. And while it may lack the sublime artistry of Proust, Mann has his own inimitable style of beauty. The going is very slow, it takes you down two gears as a reader, and then another, as you absorbe all the dense but vague symbolism (that of Germany and her Mephistopheles, Hitler), and the complex character which is based on Schonberg. If you enjoy literature in its perfected form, National Socialist German history, Goethe's Faust legend, or dodecaphonic music, you can do no finer than this.

Mann's difficult masterpiece, 27 Jul 2001
Although translations always take something from the original, those of us who have troubles reading Mann's admittedly difficult German will surely find the reading quite pleasing. The dark and philosphical atmosphere of Mann's final masterpice is wonderfully captured in this translation. Mann's interplay of reality and imagination already permeated his "Magic Mountain" and "Joseph and his brothers", but I find that it is in "Faustus" where he finally loosens all boarders between the real and the imaginary. The reader therefore never be quite sure whether Mann is taking the objective or subjective perspective. The novel completely lacks the lightness of touch Mann used in the "Buddenbrooks", and reflects Mann's vision of the World War II. The story is only superficially similar to Goethe's Faust, and I found it very different in both tone and storyline. But both books are masterpieces and both try to explain to us what it takes to be human.

I am Der Bajazzo: I am Tonio Krueger, 05 Sep 2003
There. I admit it! I am the joker: I am Tonio Krueger. At times I am also Little Herr Friedemann, and Detlev Spinell and Gustav Aschenbach. Such is the psycological power of Thomas Mann to present the deepest insights of his protagonists. Each story is partly autobiographical and each story depicts love as seen from an outsider, sometimes fraught with pain, sometimes cosetted by tenderness.

These short stories - all from the early part of his career - will hopefully dig beneath your own preconceptions of what it means to be pained and rejected, and will therefore hopefully inspire you as it did me to be that little more charitable to fate and to unintentional cruelty.

A last word on style. Here you will see a craftsman at work where every word seems to have been examined in detail before being committed to paper. A joy to read. To use a (not wholly inappropriate) musical analogy, Thomas Mann is an author who embraces classic sonata or rondo forms, recapitulating words and phrases from earlier sections in a masterful way, and treats his themes to intense developments that provides immense satisfaction to this reader at least at the end of each story.

A novel but flawed approach, 16 Jul 2003
Studies of mortality in Italy are rarely written in such a literary style as this, and for this the author has to be commended. Instead of going for a general overview of the subject as it relates to the city in question, he has chosen to focus on an individual case, and it must be said that he does this very well. The writer is clearly blessed with artistic talent; some of the descriptive passages would not be out of place in a novel. From a scientific point of view, however, one cannot help feeling that the book would have benefited from some more general conclusions. Statistical evidence, for example, is non-existent. In this respect, it compares unfavourably with, for example, Doug Graves' 'When in Rome, Die as the Romans Do'. This is why the book rates only three stars, despite its undeniable readability.

For any paragon of self-discipline, 02 Dec 2002
Mann draws a painful distinction between artistic beauty and the sensual, erotic beauty which underpins the protagonist's downfall. At the beginning of the narrative, a paragon of self-discipline, by the end this successful writer of wide European acclaim has become a slave to his passions. The exploration of aethetic rationalism (clearly evoked by Nietzsche)is shocking in its revelation of the deadly consequences of an extreme of either passion for the sensual or for the rational. A brilliant read - a masterpiece!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!, 22 Jul 2008
At the risk of being labelled a Philistine, I declare that this book is one of the most insufferably boring tomes that has ever made it onto my bedside table. I admit that I only struggled my way through the first 170 pages, but that was enough to convince me that I should not waste any more minutes of my precious life wading through any more of this drivel.

I know, I have also been chastised for criticising modern art in the same way. Tracey Emin's "Unmade Bed" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" will just have to live in the pile of junk that I fail to understand.

I realise that I am in the minority, as most reviewers and professors of literature believe this to be a masterpiece, and probably the best book to come out of Germany in the twentieth century. Then again, Hans Christian Anderson's boy who recognised the nakedness of his Emperor as those around him admired the splendour and wonderful colours of their leader's new clothes, was also in the minority.

Perhaps, then, I shouldn't feel too bad about my opinion of this amazing piece of creative writing. It may also explain why English literature was the only `O' Level that I failed, despite having been a prolific reader all of my life. It just happened that the books that were chosen for my studies for those exams also bored me to tears.


A beautiful work of art , 26 Feb 2008
I've just finished reading The Magic Mountain this morning and I closed it with a smile on my face, having had one of the most rewarding literary experiences of my life. With it primary letimotifs of time, death and love, this wonderfully written and strange, magical book is worth every cent of your money and minute of your time. Nobody has written so eloquently on the mystery of time as Thomas Mann in this book. In a weird way it reminded me of Ulysses, in that just when some mundane detail was being described minutely, suddenly a flourish of prose would arise so breathtaking as to almost force you to close the book and wallow in the beauty of what you have just read. A masterclass of literature.

somewhat clunking translation, 17 Mar 2006
This is a book quite unlike any other, and is likely to be a read you remember for the rest of your life, it's that impressive.
One of the most sriking features is the pace, which is very deliberate....and will no doubt frustrate many readers by seeming slow and focussing on what might appear as trivialities. However, it builds into a superb picture not just of the characters but of what they represent. All of pre-WW1 european society is represented along with the preoccupations of that time. As a doctor, i also enjoyed the medical aspects of the book, including the sick role and the power of a paternalistic medical profession.

My reasons for ascribing 3 stars are entirely related to the translation by lowe-porter...she herself apologises for the quality of the work in the preface. With a shiny new translation by john woods now available, please consider obtaining that version. I "jumped ship" after reading the first 200 pages of lowe-porter's version and found the woods version so much more enjoyable, the characters have lost their muffled voices.

Big. Very big., 17 May 2005
Aptly titled book this; it is indeed mountainous - and not just in that it's huge. It is the Everest of books: it's a Herculean task to get try to conquer it but if you do the view is, to follow the metaphor, pretty spectacular. It's also entirely unlike anything I've read in just about any terms - the pace, the style, the narrative and the plot (or lack of it) are all as far as I know unique. Reading it isn't either laborious or fast-paced, I'd call it - in absence of a better word - luxurious; I found myself almost drifting through it, and at times it's no exaggeration to say I just found myself marvelling at the fluid, idea-strewn prose. Whilst it's probably not for the impatient, I still highly, highly reccommend it.

Magnificent and absorbing, 29 Apr 2002
Not only a gripping story with characters constructed in the finest detail, but also an intense meditation on the passing of time. My eagerness to read the next chapter was constantly in conflict with my desire to pause and think over what I had read so far. Persevere with it - the pace is slow to begin with - because if you like books filled with ideas, you really will be missing out if you don't give it a chance.

A timeless classic, 24 Jul 2003
Buddenbrooks is the last great classicalist novel. It tackles various themes, in the chronicling of a late-nineteenth century German borgeois family. Essesntially, like most, or all, of Mann's novels, it is the theme of decline which dominates, but the characterisation is truly inspired. As is the masterful control of language and observation. Really, it is Antonie's story, as she is the only one who actually survives from beginning to end, and in all honesty, she is the strongest and most beautifully drawn character. But little Hanno steals the show right at the last moment, a sort of prelude to Tonio Kroger as it were, with slight intimations to Faustus, and no doubt slightly an autoportrait. The technique of leitmotif which Mann borrowed from Wagner is most apparent in this novel, as is his love of Schopenhauer, and the novel overall reads as a deep and philosophically satisfying epic, though just as readable as any blockbuster family-novel of the modern day. The Porter translation is essential, as she spent her life following Mann and putting him into English.

sheer perfection....., 03 Aug 2002
i've read Buddenbrooks twice & hope to read it again a.s.a.p.(i'm
a voracious reader so finding time is a problem!!).Having initially read "The Magic Mountain" which i also enjoyed(though
found much of the philosophical stuff difficult),Buddenbrooks was
a revelation due to the sense of place,period & Mann's ability to
create characters i really cared about...but also,just a fine
story of the life & times of one 19th century family.Its written
with such clarity,elegance & assurance that i felt Mann was giv-
ing me the biography of his own forbears.
The leisurely pace,the attention to detail(such as dress,house-
furnishings,cuisine etc)& the varying individual traits of the
family members & other characters in the book all combined to give it a sparkle & vividness which i rarely find in most modern
fiction;it seems to me that writing of this calibre is now a
thing of the past,something to be lamented along with the passing of the times the author describes.
In these very different days in which we live,its truly a
pleasure to be transported by way of literature to a past which
has gone forever..though, thanks to Mann, still there to be
discovered & meditated upon.
Am i a romantic escapist? Well...i'd have to confess i am if its an escape to a milieu of this class & quality,one that makes
you sorry when you reach the final page.To me, a shimmering
jewel of a novel. If you havent read it, i hope i may have
persuaded you to do so...just a teeny little bit ?

Masterly insights into a period of social change., 17 Oct 2001
Buddenbrooks may look and sound to the prespective reader like a massive challenge, but Thomas Mann's first novel, published when he was 25, is remarkable for many things and not least of these is the ease with which it can be read.

Opening in 1835, it charts the lives of the Buddenbrooks through some 40 years, following the decline of this successful Hanseatic family. But Mann's magnum opus - it was cited on his 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature - is more than that: what it presents is a detailed and complex social view of a changing Germany, particularly taking in the turbulence of the revolutionary period around 1848 to the years after unification under Bismarck in 1871.

From a position of social and economic authority, the Buddenbrooks' confidence and power is overtaken by events around them until they are, finally, reduced to an insignificant echo of a former age. Their inability to move with the times, even though they are not incapable of seeing the changes around them, renders them impotent in the face of passing history.

The only Buddenbrook who survives is Antonie... not because of her flexibility however, but precisely because her childlike petulance and unquestioning faith in the status quo allows her to maintain her arrogant assumptions about the social position of the family and, therefore, her own role within it. And yet this belligerent refusal to move forward is a major factor in the family's decline.

Buddenbrooks also works so well because of Mann's dispassionate portrayal of his characters and their disappearing world. His gentle irony, particularly in terms of dealing with religion, provides the reader with a constant intellectual challenge. And, while it was first published in 1901, this is a book that never feels dated.

A little knowledge of 19th century German history helps, but is not essential to enjoying this absolutely superb novel.

Generation by Generation, 25 Apr 1999
(John E. Woods' new translation is highly regarded. For me, the tone of it seems a bit too contemporary for the text, but I presume it's a big advance over the previous translation which I haven't checked out.) Since this is a big complex multi-generational family saga of 730 pages, I figured I'd better draw up a list of characters as I read. However, after I had a list of about 75 characters, and sensing that there were hundreds more to come, I realized that such a list wasn't really necessary, for the book was written in such a way that it was very easy to remember who was who. This is an intimidating novel, but it turns out to be a surprisingly easy read. One also cares very much for the various characters, and has affection for them as if they were real, which they very well might have been. One is there when they are born, and when they are married, and when they die, generation by generation. It is amazing that Mann could have written such an ambitious book at such an early age (it was published in his 25th year), but it is much more than ambitious, it is very sophisticated, and very wise and profound in many ways. This is a book that can teach anyone at any age many things about human nature, or if not teach at least remind and/or clarify. I certainly feel as if I was learning a lot about the kind of social milieu my grandparents grew up in. The novel doesn't attempt to tie every single one of its "loose ends" at the end, but it has a grace and elegance that is very compelling from beginning to end. The society it portrays, in Lubeck Germany during the 19th century, is not particularly attractive one, and it is not one which one feels nostalgic for. It is gone for ever, but one does not wish it back. Number 8 on the Fireside Reading Club "A"-List, read 2/20/96.

Like Everest, some people just have to climb it, 22 Oct 2007
I have wanted to read this book for a long time, and decided to take the plunge on discovering this new translation by John E Woods. This is a monster of a book - at 854 closely typeset pages, it is going to take a long time to read - in my case, the best part of a month. My opinion on finishing is that if you like this sort of thing its tremendously rewarding, but even still its going to be a difficult read at times, and you will find that some of the dense philosophical dialogue will need to be skim-read if you are not going to get bogged down.

There are many think I liked about it:

- A unique setting and situation - the patients at a Swiss Sanatorium in the 77 years preceding World War 1;

- The closed world Mann creates with its obsessions and rivalries, its artificial manners and routines. This is a unique fictitious society, but one that is entirely credible in view of the situation its inhabitants find themselves in;

- The way it so perfectly captures the state of mind of the patients, their adaptation to their illness and the way they have found a community that accepts them as they are;

- The creation of a timeless world where months merge into one another and years pass without notice;

- The way the sanatorium is a microcosm of Europe in the early part of the 20th century, with all the national conflicts in the wider world being played out in this intense community of tuberculosis sufferers.

- The perfect descriptions of obsessive states of mind that can be developed in such situations, imaginary love affairs, supernatural occurrences, intense antagonisms on the one hand and alliances on the other.

On the downside, the characters in the novel are incredibly verbose. When they speak, they go on for pages, and you have to picture the other people in the conversations standing politely waiting for the speaker to finish before they launch off into their own equally dense replies. However, this is all part of Mann's creation of "timelessness", and if you want to read this book in a hurry you're going to miss the point.

The translation is modern and natural and while I do not read German, I suspect that the spirit of the author comes through the pages.

I am pleased to have read this and feel quite a sense of achievement. My only regret is that I felt the ending is a bit hurried (remarkable for this book!), and is not entirely satisfactory. However, undoubtedly a pillar of 20th century literature, this book should not be missed - if you have the time to read it.

Amazing but v. long., 25 May 2006
I confess I've not finished it, but for the first half I was spellbound. It seems to go off a bit when one of the characters starts givingvery long speeches, so it turns into a different kind of book. If you don't believe that a story about a TB sanitorium can be gripping - you're wrong.
But let me address one very strange thing about my copy, which raises an interesting point about translations. I read the English translation (from original German) but there's an absolutely key passage of the book in which the language switches to French for about six pages, and was left untranslated. Fortunately I can (just about) get by in French, but if one has an English translation, wouldn't it be best to translate all non-English passages, with some note as to the language they are in? Otherwise it's a bit of a swizz.

The destruction of genius portrayed - in an outstanding translation, 27 Apr 2008
I don't find Thomas Mann's books, such as Doctor Faustus at all easy to read. They are both long and highly complex, written not as a novel as such but to transmit a message, in this case, the similarities between the Faustus legend and the rise of Nazi Germany. However, I have been fortunate to read both this book and another major work of Mann, The Magic Mountain, in new translations by John E Woods which bring a clear and smooth passage through these undoubtedly great works of literature.

Dr Faustus is on the face of it, a fictional biography of Adrian Leverkuhn, a brilliant composer who came to fame in the 1920s and 30s. The biography is recorded by his life-long friend Dr Serenus Leitblom, who happens to have possession of Leverkuhn's journals including a secret manuscript, which comes to light about half way through the book, which gives an account of the terrible evening when Leverkuhn entered into a pact with the devil, to exchange his soul for 24 years of brilliant musical composition.

Dr Leitblom has a hard time of it with Adrian Leverkuhn, the friendship never achieving an easy intimacy, and several times there are references to Leverkuhn's refusal to use the personal pronoun with even his closest associates. He is unapproachable and isolated, and takes private rooms in a farmhouse, some distance from Munich. His almost hermit-like existence is relieved by train journeys into the city where he takes part in musical and philosophical soirees, described in some detail by Mann and showing his command of the most complex musical ideas.

Leverkuhn's music is rarely well-received, being appreciated by only a select band of critics, the message being that it is too rarified for the common concert-goer, but will eventually be vindicated by generations to come. The implication is that only listeners similarly in league with the devil would be able to appreciate its complex abstractions.

Dr Leitblom writes his biography during the dark days of 1944 when Germany's collapse was seen as inevitable, and the tragic destiny of Leverkuhn is contrasted with occasional short accounts of the unfolding disasters caused by allied bombing of the great cities of Germany and the breaches of its borders by invading armies. This gives the whole book an atmosphere of burning cities and the inevitable doom which awaits Leverkuhn all who sup at the devil's table, the final chapter being a revelatory denouement which shows the dark forces which have worked through Leverkuhn's music throughout his life.

By the time Mann wrote this book he was living in America and broadcasting radio messages into Germany criticizing the Nazi regime. Dr Faustus is in some ways Mann's ultimate critique of Nazism, something he had been fighting since its first appearance in the 1920s. Dr Faustus is not an easy read, far from it, but it is an important element of world literature and great piece of art in its own right which can only enrich the reader who perseveres with it.

The demonic forces in the human psyche, 19 Nov 2006
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann is a challenging work, monumental in conception. Many of its 525 pages are not easy to read, especially the ones dealing with the theory and history of music to those not familiar with this subject. The discussion of modern and classical music is inevitable as Adrian Leverkuhn, the main character in the book, is said to be a great composer.

This novel is said to an "allegory of the rise and fall of the Third Reich", but what does that actually mean? The way I understand it is that Mann asks himself the question, how is it that the nation which produced the sublime music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven also produced Hitler and the horrors of the Holocaust? His novel is an artistic attempt at finding an answer to this question. For this purpose, Mann makes use of the legend and myth of Faustus, the man who is said to have sold his soul to the Devil -Precarious territory to negotiate in an age when those of intellectual standing don't believe in the Devil. In Mann's balancing act he makes use of his narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, a close friend of Adrian. Zeitblom was born a Roman Catholic, but now considers himself a Humanist, whereas Adrian is born to a Lutheran family.

According to Zeitblom's account, Adrian firmly believes that he has sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the ability to compose great music. It is worth quoting Adrian's own words here: "It is an age when no work is to be done in pious sober fashion and by proper means, and art has grown impossible sans the Devil's aid and hellish fire beneath the kettle......art is stuck fast and grown too difficult and mocks its very self, that all has grown too difficult..." The age he is referring to is the period after the First World War when Germany is resentfully licking its wounds of defeat, and the despair and turmoil in that country provides the fertile soil for the rise of Nazism.

Zeitblom gives us a description of the last work composed by Adrian, an oratorio entitled The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus. He says that the climactic passage of this work could be described as an "Ode to Sorrow", a lamentation, in contrast to Beethoven's Ode to Joy. "There is no doubt that he wrote it with an eye to Beethoven's Ninth, as its counterpart in the most melancholy sense of the word." While Beethoven's symphony may be said to be religious in the conventional sense, Zeitblom suggests that Adrian's work is also religious in a different sense. "A work dealing with the Tempter, with apostasy, with damnation - how can it be anything but a religious work!"

Although Adrian completed this work in 1930, I think Zeitblom (and Mann) is suggesting that he foreshadowed the total destruction of Germany by writing this Lamentation. It is likely that Mann wants us to understand the myth of the Devil in the same way that Herman Melville did less consciously in Moby Dick. Many critics have felt that the Great White Whale represents God, while Captain Ahab is the Devil. In Mann's novel, Adrian is one of the few people living in that era who recognized the demonic forces at work in the human psyche. Those who deny these forces become True Nazis. A Nazi would never admit that he is doing the work of the Devil; he sees himself as a God-like being whose duty it is to purify the human race.

What is the relevance of this message for the 21st century? I think it is that those who are unaware of and deny the demonic forces within themselves become the unconscious instruments of these forces. However, Doctor Faustus is a great work of literature which depicts a concrete reality in the life of its characters, and there are likely to be many possible interpretations.


A Reckoning.,, 27 Apr 2005
"Yes ... we are lost. That is to say: the war is lost, but that means more than a lost military campaign, in fact it means that *we* are lost, lost is our substance and our soul, our faith and our history. It is over with Germany; ... an unnamable collapse, economical, political, moral and spiritual, in short, all-encompassing, is becoming apparent, - I don't want to have wished for what is looming, because it is despair, it is madness."*

Thus, the narrator of Thomas Mann's last completed and, I think, greatest novel sums up Germany's fate after the barbarities of national-socialism. But this is no mere character speaking: This is Mann himself - the erstwhile self-proclaimed "Unpolitical Man," condemned to watch the Nazi tyranny's horrors from the distance of his Californian exile, taking up the mighty pen that had gained him his Literature Nobel Prize and, through the voice of a narrator named Dr. Serenus Zeitbloom (in itself, supremely ironic comment on Mann's own circumstances) composing his final reckoning with the country he left when the Nazis came to power, and where he never returned to live, although he finally did leave t