Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

May 04, 2018 Lisa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, thomas-mann, nobels

"Ode to Despair"

Figuratively or musically speaking, Thomas Mann lets time and culture move backwards, from the emotional bliss and security of Beethoven's 9th symphony expressing hope for humanity, to his 5th symphony symbolising fate knocking at the door, in one German novel of gigantic weight and proportions.

Starting with the 19th century's belief in progress and development, the plot moves us through the delusional madness of the first and second world wars, showing the genius of German cult "Ode to Despair"

Figuratively or musically speaking, Thomas Mann lets time and culture move backwards, from the emotional bliss and security of Beethoven's 9th symphony expressing hope for humanity, to his 5th symphony symbolising fate knocking at the door, in one German novel of gigantic weight and proportions.

Starting with the 19th century's belief in progress and development, the plot moves us through the delusional madness of the first and second world wars, showing the genius of German culture degenerate into mental disease and the destructive power of Nazi Germany.

We follow a narrator's obsessively close analysis of a childhood friend, a talented and self-important musician with charisma. His path is marked by the historical era and personal setbacks, and his slow physical decline due to the contraction of a sexually transmitted disease is mirrored in the poisoning of German minds during the first half of the 20th century.

The climax of the novel is of mythical power. A young child, a lovely five-year-old boy who goes by the ominous name of Echo, dies in brutal pain of meningitis, and the musician who watches this happen in despair rejects Beethoven's 9th symphony and its joyous message. It is a year of fate, a time of decline, the beginning of the 1930s, and after losing the lovely Echo, the artist is locked in the introspection of a lost Narcissus - unhappily in love with himself and unable to interact constructively with the world. Only an Echo of past times remains...

The Faustian pact with the devil played out on the stage of German 20th century catastrophe, told in the old-fashioned novel language of the erudite 19th century's educational idealism - a heavy diet to digest for sure!

It is the swan song of a novel tradition that Thomas Mann saw as one of the casualties of modern life and warfare.

How to even think or write in German after the Holocaust, he asks himself in the narrator's voice on the last pages, when his hero is dying in a state of idiocy while the masters of the Third Reich kill themselves after having destroyed the culture for which Beethoven - and Thomas Mann - used to be symbols.

Powerfully eloquent, hopelessly sad, surviving despite the odds, this is a true masterpiece in multiple layers, but not for the faint of heart! ...more

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Jan 19, 2014 Fionnuala added it

Shelves: review-may-contain-comic-content, translated-from-german, mann-and-related

Spring cleaning my goodreads shelves recently, I noticed the absence of a review for this book.
Truth to tell, I was aware of its absence — the thought of reviewing Doctor Faustus has haunted me since I finished the book two months ago. But spring cleaning is still a useful analogy. When the stronger rays of the sun hit our window panes at this time of the year, they reveal the layers of dust that have built up on the glass over the winter, and which block our view of the outside world. Serenus ...more

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Oct 17, 2012 Kalliope rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics, fiction-german, literary-classics, germany, faust-theme-read

THE LAMENTATIONS OF THE HUMANIST NOVEL

Oratorio in Five Parts.

Composer: M.

Conductor’s Edition.

Dynamics and Mood: Melancholia.

Tonality: G** minor.

Venue: Church of St. Thomas, Leipzig.

Date: 23rd May 1943.

Duration: The Hour-Glass will determine its Time.

Première: Serenus Zeitblom as Conductor.

Singers: Tanya Orlanda (a dramatic soprano and a stupendous woman with a heroic voice).

Harald Kjoejelund (as Heldentenor, a quite rotund man with pince-nez and voice of brass. (p. 293)

OVERTURE

I, ~~John~~ Seren ...more

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Oct 16, 2017 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

“…a night, where it doesn’t get dark for the lightnings.”
This was the entire troubled life of the great groundbreaking composer Adrian Leverkühn…
This is the world of man:

All about him was coldness – and how do I feel, using this word, which he himself, in an uncanny connection, once also set down? Life and experience can give to single syllables an accent utterly divorcing them from their common meaning and lending them an aura of horror, which nobody understands who has not learned them in that

...more

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Jul 10, 2014 Lee Klein rated it really liked it

Got up before dawn this morning to finish the last two chapters with coffee, knew I wouldn't be able to read the final 17 pages last night -- didn't really want to put the book down over the past few days as it started to take off towards its finale thanks to way more dramatization than in, well, most of it. Like all Mann I've read it requires and it rewards patience. Like in The Magic Mountain, if you make it through the first 250–300 slow, dense pages, things take off at a pretty good upwards Got up before dawn this morning to finish the last two chapters with coffee, knew I wouldn't be able to read the final 17 pages last night -- didn't really want to put the book down over the past few days as it started to take off towards its finale thanks to way more dramatization than in, well, most of it. Like all Mann I've read it requires and it rewards patience. Like in The Magic Mountain, if you make it through the first 250–300 slow, dense pages, things take off at a pretty good upwards clip, plus the long opening semi-slog becomes a super-strong foundation on which Mr. Mann builds his dramatic and thematic pinnacles. I'm glad I read this after Stefan Zweig's Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon, which presents three real case studies of melancholic genius/madness in Germanic artists -- Adrian fits the bill. I streamed F.M. Murnau's 1926 silent film version of "Faust" earlier in the year -- and I really only remember a few images from it: a dark cloud enveloping a city that's also Satan's wing, the ending image of the Christ-like embodiment of Love ("Liebe"). (I've never made it through more than a few pages of Goethe's "Faust," deeming it maybe untranslatable.) In Mann's version, no archangel swoops in to rescue the damned. A divine little boy makes a stand toward the end but not for long, thanks to Adrian's pact, which is sort of the point of the novel's end -- after Nazi horrorshow, the mass destruction and murder but also the eternal damnation in the narrator's eyes of all things German (the land, the people, the language, the culture), redemption/hope for humanity won't come easy. Only after everything is destroyed, including Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," which Adrian's "The Lamentations of Dr. Faustus" reverses, do we have a chance. I found the narrator (the POV/approach) pretty problematic through most (not all) of the novel. I was all like why's Mann mussing his story with this mask? Why not just tell the story of the damned musical genius and parallel it with WWII hell and otherwise get outta the way of its awesomeness? Temporally, Mann probably needed the musical overthrow of polyphony to precede Nazi overthrow of humanity, since it wouldn't have made historical sense if they occurred simultaneously? Maybe Mann also wanted to formally disrupt the story the way Adrian uses dissonance? Regardless, it's hard to believe that the narrator isn't Mann himself. When Zeitblom says oh how badly I'm writing, I think something like oh how badly Mann is trying to express his story through this narrator who of course shouldn't write as well as Thomas Mann but then, well, every once in a while takes on these jags of straight-up towering literary artistry. Four point five stars since I can't shake the sense I had through the first 250 pages that such a lengthy development wasn't totally necessary, that these pages could have been reduced and integrated after Adrian's pact with Satan, although of course that would've been a sensationalist way to start the novel. It helps I guess that we have young Adrian's secret, almost ashamed discovery of the harmonium, the image of his arrogant laughter, the characterizing repetition of that gesture of a sort of absence as he turns away with a slight smile. There's also the foundation of the relationship the narrator has with Adrian, the boyhood chumminess/love complete with use of the informal familiar tense, and then the loss of that and the narrator's jealousy for the friendship, most likely also of the flesh, per Adrian's confession at the end, between Adrian and the flirty violinist. As in a lot of Mann, there's suggested homosexuality -- this time between Adrian and the violinist. There's also maybe the suggestion that Adrian contracted syphilis from "touching" the girl with the flat-nose/mermaid/Esmeralda/muse that leads to migraines and madness? One of the most memorable scenes is when the virtuoso violinist sits in with a little chamber orchestra in a room of a hotel with a glass floor, wows everyone, and then insists on skiing behind the horse-drawn sleigh. He's clearly doomed at that moment -- a superhuman figure, who like little Echo the golden boy, is doomed. Loved the two teachers early on -- the typical proto-Nazi German and the American stutterer who conveys his passion for music to Adrian. The music elements weren't as pronounced as I thought they'd be -- I couldn't quite follow all of it but I got the gist for the most part. At one time I pulled out my guitar to confirm that the notes written out for the refrain that acknowledges Adrian's muse sound like the devil's tritone, which we all know from "Black Sabbath". Loved the few pages where Adrian relays what it's like to journey underwater in a diving bell, passages that extrapolate out to discussion of the infinite cosmos -- reminded me of Hans lost in the snow in "The Magic Mountain" and Joseph in the well in Joseph and His Brothers, still by far my fave of the Mann I've read. Mann excels when he places a sensitive young dude in potentially tragic solitary confinement. In this one, Adrian's confinement is all-encompassing and intellectual rather than physical. In general, after a slow start thanks mostly to long essayistic stretches, the story takes off, addled by cliffhangers and some melodrama, sure, but it's all saved by the heft of the pacts Germany and Adrian have made with evil. Really an amazingly ambitious artistic achievement -- worth re-reading though I doubt I will anytime soon -- 4.5 stars for now although I'll maybe knock it up to five over time as I remember the strong finish/overall sense of it and everything else falls away.

...more

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Mar 25, 2015 Geoff rated it it was amazing

"No, to the very end, this dark tone poem permits no consolation, reconciliation, transfiguration. But what if the artistic paradox, which says that expression, the expression of lament, is born out of the construct as a whole, corresponds to the religious paradox, which says that out of the profoundest irredeemable despair, if only as the softest of questions, hope may germinate? This would be hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair - not its betrayal, but the miracle that goes b "No, to the very end, this dark tone poem permits no consolation, reconciliation, transfiguration. But what if the artistic paradox, which says that expression, the expression of lament, is born out of the construct as a whole, corresponds to the religious paradox, which says that out of the profoundest irredeemable despair, if only as the softest of questions, hope may germinate? This would be hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair - not its betrayal, but the miracle that goes beyond faith. Just listen to the ending, listen with me: One instrumental group after the other steps back, and what remains as the work fades away is the high G of a cello, the final word, the final sound, floating off, slowly vanishing in a pianissimo fermata. Then nothing more. Silence and night. But the tone, which is no more, for which, as it hangs there vibrating in the silence, only the soul still listens, and which was the dying note of sorrow - is no longer that, its meaning changes, it stands as a light in the night.”

~~

Yes, Doctor Faustus is clearly an allegory for the rise of the Third Reich. (And to a certain extent, it can be read as Mann’s moral reckoning with his self-imposed exile from those events. I am ever averse to read biography into fiction, but there are obvious parallels between Mann and Leverkühn and his Boswell Serenus Zeitblom’s world-withdrawal (oh what names in this book! wonderful bizarre naming that even Pynchon would be proud of!)) To me, the disintegration of the German state into barbarism is among the least interesting facets of this tremendously complex work, whose sections discussing music theory and philosophy alone would justify its existence. But of course here we are given so much more : It is a sorrowful and tragic study of the troubling nature of genius, the public’s relation to genius and genius’s own response to the cursed manifold life of the person driven to create; at the same time it is a rather thorough history and critique of Western music, an exhaustive study of its origins and development; it is also a novel full of characters eccentric, doomed, strange, living through a particularly horrible period of history; mostly, it is concerned with elucidating the fate of secular and theological approaches to life and art as civilization careened into the nihilism of the 20th century; it is about the dialectic of history and how resolutions splinter into further antagonisms, in personal and historical circumstances, and how wholeness, which can really only be conceived or achieved through great works of art, often comes at a terrible cost to the ones who have brought it into being. It is a book very much about the limits of human love to influence worldly events. Mann’s intelligence is so thorough and far-reaching that all of this is given in what seems effortless exposition, in lovely prose that is able to elide easily from subjects as disparate as the biblical origins of ethics to the particularities of polyphony in atonal composition, and make them all seem of a piece. It falls on the side of forgiveness and the urge toward love in the face of the baffling incomprehensibility of humanity’s monstrous failings. Here Mann locates art, that which resolves the horrible contradictions, which expresses in ambiguous tones something that, as much as is possible within the limits of our expressive capabilities, names the approach of grace. It is a chorale of poor sinners’ laments, the accumulated wail which is the song of the world, this drop of water spinning in the abyss, which, despite everything, is still a light in the night. ...more

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Jan 13, 2014 Tony rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: german, favorites, music, top-10-2014

Is it enough to say I loved it?

No, that won't do. Although, it seems silly to write a proper review. Oh, there are pages of notes stuck in the back: some pretension of understanding. But this is a book you could devote an entire academic life to. Or even be humbled in a group read with readers who know or can track down every clue.

(My thanks to all of you who enriched this read. And for letting me tag along. I don't know if all group reads are like this (I suspect not); but my sincere thanks to ...more

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Jun 09, 2020 Katia N rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

“Now we will throw these mediocre kitchmongers into a slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.”

This was uttered in 1914 at the beginning of the the first World War. By the “kitchmongers” he means the French and their culture. Would you guess who said it? It was not Mann, though he was not far behind in the sentiment at that time. These words belong to Arnold Schoenberg, the avant-garde composer, music genius for some and the scandalous upstart for ano ...more

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Jan 15, 2014 Elena rated it it was amazing

This is not a beach book. The literature on Thomas Mann's "Doktor Faustus" is huge, and I'm glad I didn't try to master it all. I tackled the novel (actually re-reading it after 40 years) with an untutored but relatively open mind. However, I needed a reading group to get through it, and here goodreads really came through for me with an international group of 14 close readers on the same schedule. They helped enormously.

Thomas Mann wrote his fiction in response to a heartbreaking reality: his b This is not a beach book. The literature on Thomas Mann's "Doktor Faustus" is huge, and I'm glad I didn't try to master it all. I tackled the novel (actually re-reading it after 40 years) with an untutored but relatively open mind. However, I needed a reading group to get through it, and here goodreads really came through for me with an international group of 14 close readers on the same schedule. They helped enormously.

Thomas Mann wrote his fiction in response to a heartbreaking reality: his beloved Germany committed such atrocious crimes in World War II that, from his exile in the US, he felt obligated to broadcast, in German, into Germany. He explained to his compatriots that total defeat was the only honorable way out. Germans who secretly listened to his illegal radio broadcasts, as the bombs were demolishing their homes, say they found his message comforting. I don't know that an American like me can fully understand.

There are a couple naive questions that get asked a lot, and of course don't have answers. One is "How can the culture that produced Bach and Beethoven also produce Auschwitz." A second naive question is "Can there be poetry after Auschwitz." I think about the novel "Doktor Faustus" as a response instead of an answer. For all the unique aspects of this tragedy, there are other cultures with a similar paradox. Japanese artists produced some of the most gentle, peaceful artworks ever created, even as the military of that same culture brutalized their neighbors. I think the shorthand for this is the title "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" used by Ruth Benedict. But Mann himself does not even think of relativizing the catastrophe with comparisons. He confronts the good and the bad sides of German genius as something totally intertwined, without trying to distinguish between "good Germans" and "bad Germans" as some commentators have done. Culture is an interwoven tapestry.

The Faust legend arose when the invention of the printing press was revolutionizing a society that still believed in devils. The sudden access to knowledge was seen as something dangerous. That's pretty much biblical too. Somehow sex inevitably gets into the mix in all these myths. Mann expects his readers to be familiar with Goethe's take on the Faustian pact, but he doesn't reference it directly. Since music has served as a source of great national pride for Germany, starting long before the country actually existed as a unified nation-state, Mann revises the deal with the devil. The brilliant composer Adrian Leverkuehn trades his soul, not for knowledge, not for happiness, but for musical talent, specifically talent for composing modern music. The genius is undeniably powerful, but it destroys his soul. What a metaphor for the political and human disaster. But this theme is also an opening for Mann to introduce a cluster of colorful characters who discuss music in great detail,--all about polyphony and counterpoint and twelve tone composition....These discussions somehow lift the text out of the swamp. Mann's richly detailed story, drenched in quirky irony, becomes oddly comforting. It's pretty much impossible to explain.

The book is long. It is narrated by a fuddy-duddy friend of the composer, with the nutty name of Serenus Zeitblom. Mann has a lot of fun with his long-winded narrator. The chapters shift radically from one mood to another, like movements in a symphonic piece of music. Themes and images, like the butterfly and the little mermaid, are introduced early on, then dropped, only to reappear hundreds of pages later in unexpected variations, a verbal Wagnerian Leitmotiv effect. Adrian's communications with Lucifer are completely logically explained by his medical and psychiatric conditions. But the highly ornate way Mann presents it all--with fleeting images that appear and disappear, and with shifting moods--seduces the readers into his dangerous world. And everyone's soul is in danger. Without the lengthy build up, I don't think the book would work at all.

Adrian comes from a farm, where his life begins and ends. His musical talent comes from his beautiful mother, but she is wise enough not to develop her talent. His other introduction to music comes from the simple milkmaid, who teaches the country children charming folk songs, including a hauntingly beautiful "round." After selling his soul, he finds a refuge on a monastery turned farm estate, where he rents an elegant studio from the generous farmer's wife. And there he writes amazing music that goes out into the world. These two farms are the "real" Germany, the source. When Adrian has his final nervous breakdown in front of a gathering of friends, the noble farmer's wife, Frau Schweigestill, comforts him and sends the guests away, because they (like me) could never understand. Haneke's film "Das weisse Band," addresses the question of collective guilt among the peasantry in a relentlessly depressing way. Mann's take is totally different, and more nuanced. Something indigenous, that is beautiful and magical, has a dangerous internal logic...I don't think Mann asks us to read this as a universal, but that is how I read it. We Americans need to deal with certain aspects of our culture and its internal logic...

The other simplistic question, the one about poetry after Auschwitz, is implicit in these discussions. Mann's close friend and adviser on the book, Adorno, famously examined this issue. I see Mann's response in the poetic passages of his writing. I think poetry may be the only way to come to terms with some aspects of human history, think of Paul Celan or Nelly Sachs. (Myself, I'm not so sure whether other arts like music, painting, or architecture ever recovered from the brutalization of the 20th century.) The poetry in Mann's prose emerges very slowly, in baroque sentences and page long paragraphs. Like an unfolding flower, you just can't rush it. I went to a Buddhist mediation class where we sat on the floor for four hours chanting and visualizing a lotus slowly blossoming. At the end I felt like I was levitating. I asked afterward if there might be a more efficient method that we could do in say 20 minutes. Nope. Mann's way with words gradually lifts off the ground. A more concise reading exercise could not build the same spell. This all by way of partly explaining why a novel about such a horrifying history can be oddly beautiful. I will never really understand, of course, but language can in itself be comforting.

...more

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Sep 26, 2016 Jonathan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, in2dawoods

This is my third read of this novel, though my first with this translation. It is a little like that scene in teen movies where the (already beautiful) "awkward girl" descends the stairs post make-over, allowing one to see with glaring clarity the gorgeousness that was always already there.

So, because it amuses me, and in an effort to overdo an already rather rubbish analogy, on the left, ladies and gents, we have H. T. Lowe-Porter's version of the novel, on the right that of Mr Woods. Although ...more

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Aug 31, 2007 Rebecca rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: Anyone looking for an intellectually-engaging read

Recommended to Rebecca by: DK

Shelves: 1001, music, fiction

It is rare that it takes three months for me to finish a novel, but I have a few theories as to why this was (aside from the rigors of a teaching schedule/adjunct commute).
The novel operates on so many levels it is difficult to read more than a few chapters before you need to stop to digest. Keeping track of the numerous secondary characters is a painstaking, but worthwhile, endeavor. Mann forms his environment with this multitude, presenting a photograph of German bourgeois life in the early 20 It is rare that it takes three months for me to finish a novel, but I have a few theories as to why this was (aside from the rigors of a teaching schedule/adjunct commute).
The novel operates on so many levels it is difficult to read more than a few chapters before you need to stop to digest. Keeping track of the numerous secondary characters is a painstaking, but worthwhile, endeavor. Mann forms his environment with this multitude, presenting a photograph of German bourgeois life in the early 20th century.

The book warrants musicological analysis in its debt to Schoenberg, its continuation of the intimate connection between Faust and music, and its portraiture of Germanic musical existence (for starters). But even outside of musicological inquiry, the book is full of literary paths one can tread should they choose. The relationship between the book's narrator and his forsaken hero, Adrian, dallies in sentiments rarely explored between two male characters. There are some echoes of Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, except that Adrian Leverkühn's encounter with "love" comes with dire consequences.

I'd like to re-read the novel with a focus on the music only, because what resonated for me most loudly was how the book serves as a treatise on the dangers of blind nationalism. The narrator, Zeitblom, frustrates the reader with his various digressions, until you realize they are not digressions at all but allegories. His reflections about wartime Germany telescope into Adrian's own struggles. There were moments that made me stop and put the book down as I was yanked into my own reality:

"...the democracy of the West--however outdate its institutions may prove over time, however obstinately its notion of freedom resists what is new and necessary--is nonetheless essentially on the side of human progress, of the goodwill to perfect society, and is by its very nature capable of renewal, improvement, rejuvenation, of proceeding toward conditions that provide greater justice in life." (358)

I suppose I still believe this...but I note also Zeitblom's comments a couple of pages earlier regarding Germany:

"It is the demand of a regime that does not wish to grasp, that apparently does not understand even now, that it has been condemned, that it must vanish, laden witht eh curse of having made itself intolerable to the world--no, of having made us, Germany, the Reich, let me go farther and say, Germanness, everything German, intolerable to the world." (356)

This is why I read.

Readers who have no musical background will likely find themselves frustrated with some of the lengthy musical explications. I suggest skipping/skimming them. Normally I would never recommend this, but there is so much else to be had from reading this novel that it would be such a disservice to throw the myriad babies out with the musical bathwater. For the musically-inclined reader, however, the plethora of references to composers and pieces is a ready-made listening list and a chance to experience a nation's struggle with both political and aesthetic ideologies.

(Crossposted)
...more

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Nov 16, 2013 Sue rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-2014, germany, classics, favorites

I have hesitated to write a review of this book because there is so much here and it is so difficult to know where to begin. Based on the Doctor Faustus story, it is the tale of one Adrian Leverkühn, born early in the 20th century, who trades his soul for the ability to compose brilliant music. Of course this is a limited pact, in his case for 24 years. His story is told by a childhood (and adult) friend Serenus Zeitblom, who also presents the changes in German culture during the years, ending w I have hesitated to write a review of this book because there is so much here and it is so difficult to know where to begin. Based on the Doctor Faustus story, it is the tale of one Adrian Leverkühn, born early in the 20th century, who trades his soul for the ability to compose brilliant music. Of course this is a limited pact, in his case for 24 years. His story is told by a childhood (and adult) friend Serenus Zeitblom, who also presents the changes in German culture during the years, ending with the bombing of Germany by the Allies and the encroaching Russian army.

The allegories are plentiful, the writing is often amazing. I read the final 150 pages as if in a fury...I was compelled to keep reading. The writing itself seemed inspired as if Mann himself were truly on fire from his subject.

Since the end of March now---and the date is 25 April
in this year of destiny 1945---our nation's defenses in the
west have plainly been in total disarray. Newspapers, already
half un-shackled, record the truth; rumor, fed by the enemy's
radio broadcasts and by the stories of those who have fled,
knows no censorship and has carried the particulars of this
rapidly expanding catastrophe to regions of the Reich that
have not yet been swallowed up in it, not yet liberated by
it---even to my refuge here.There is no stopping it:
surrender on all sides, everyone scattering. Our shattered
and devastated cities fall like ripe plums. (p 504)

And one quite beautiful, and sad, musical comment:

The echo, the sound of the human voice returned as a
sound of nature, revealed as a sound of nature, is in
essence a lament, nature's melancholy 'Ah, yes' to man,
her attempt to proclaim his solitude, just as vice versa,
the nymphs' lament is, for its part, related to the echo.
In Leverkühn's final and loftiest creation, however, echo,
that favorite device of the baroque, is frequently
employed to unutterably mournful effect. (p 510)

In spite of a few sections on musical theory/construction that I, quite frankly, did not understand, I grew to admire and ultimately become attached to this book. It is now my favorite of the Thomas Mann novels read. Toward the end of the book, in passages such as the latter, I even began to glimpse some of what Mann was saying in the musical interludes.

I think this is a brilliant book, written by a German ex-pat living in the United States, compelled to write of what he knew to be a horror in the land he loved.

I do recommend this with the acknowledgment that this is, at times, not an easy read. But it is ultimately so worthwhile. ...more

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Mar 15, 2016 Chris Chapman rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: zz-yr-2016, read-three-or-more

It has been a long time since I thought so much about a book, jotted down so many notes as I was reading. Oh the joy of a book that challenges, provokes... Having said that, it does nothing to charm and seduce. The narrator is not easy to love, being, as he admits, a "sobersides", and clearly emotionally repressed; there are long passages about musical theory, and a transcription of the conversation of a group of students on a Wandervogel outing, discussing the nature and destiny of the German p It has been a long time since I thought so much about a book, jotted down so many notes as I was reading. Oh the joy of a book that challenges, provokes... Having said that, it does nothing to charm and seduce. The narrator is not easy to love, being, as he admits, a "sobersides", and clearly emotionally repressed; there are long passages about musical theory, and a transcription of the conversation of a group of students on a Wandervogel outing, discussing the nature and destiny of the German people - each trying to outdo the other for philosophical / mystical gymnastics.

Among the many unreliable narrators in the history of fiction, Serenus Zeitblom surely occupies an exalted position. Right from the start he tells us he is probably one of the least appropriate people to tell the story of Adrian Leverkühn, "German composer", because he is too close to him, he has too much love for him, he has no objective distance. As the account progresses there is more and more evidence of this unreliability. While clearly worshipping and adoring his friend, he is also emotionally repressed, indicating a troubled, complicating relationship with love and friendship. He is writing the events many years after the fact - we have to doubt him when he quotes the contents of a letter word for word but tells us he doesn't have the letter, and is transcribing from memory. He is clearly jealous of all of Leverkühn's hangers-on, and these take up a strangely disproportionate part of the story. He has a peculiar obsession with the form of his narrative - he apologises to us when chapters exceed a certain arbitrarily fixed length, he agonises over whether certain events belong together in one chapter - having a common theme - or should be separated into two. We begin to realise that the subject matter - his beloved friend's progress via genius to a horrible death - is very painful to Zeitblom, and this obsession with form may be a diversionary tactic.

But Zeitblom's unreliability, we realise eventually, is a double-edged sword. Or rather, it somehow turns in on itself, it inverts itself. The more he invites us not to trust him, the more we do. For a start, all the other people who surround Leverkühn, who have their own narratives, are even more barking mad than Zeitblom. And what fallibilities he has, just make him seem more human. While all of the Leverkühn hangers-on have a variety of worrying motivations - career progression, or simply basking in reflected glory - his only motivation appears to be love.

Superficially, the pact with the devil is offered as the explanation for Leverkühn's genius. Starting with the book's title we are led in that direction. Leverkühn's culminating work is a Faust opera. Then there's a curious medieval anecdote about a woman who, fearing her husband will cheat on her, goes to see a witch. The witch, having dealt with Satan and obtained powers from him, is able to help her lay a spell on said unfortunate husband. Zeitblom, significantly, pours scorn on this version of events, finding other reasons to explain the husband's predicament.

Here is where the curious effect of Zeitblom's unreliability becomes important. It is said of James Joyce that he lets the words do the work. Mann lets the reader do the work. He gives us many reasons for distrusting Zeitblom. But in the end, we trust him, and Mann knows we will. We discount the Satanic pact narrative.

Ultimately we are being asked to consider the nature of genius and where it comes from. Clever but ultimately sterile tricks with mathematical progressions, developing complex harmonic structures which pre-determine the progress of an entire piece and leave nothing to inspiration? Zeitblom's obsession with chapter lengths and the compartmentalising of events is a parallel of this. We should understand that this is also the wrong track; Zeitblom infuriates the reader with his apologies about the length of his chapters.

So what other explanations are we asked to consider? The impact of the syphilis bacterium on the brain, first accelerating its creative capacities, and then corrupting and destroying it? In the end the book is a commentary not just on the nature of genius and inspiration but also how to nurture it when you are embedded in a stifling bourgeois society. 'We also wonder if we are more monstrous than we can bear. We believe that if we were good we wouldn’t have aggressive or violent thoughts, forgetting that monstrousness is useful in art, which, to be effective, has to be pushed to an extreme, making the audience tremble. Art emerges from what Friedrich Nietzsche called “inner anarchy” and never from so-called decency' (Hanif Kureishi). This is why Leverkühn flees to the village of Pfeiffering - a carbon copy of his childhood home, where life is more real - he can horse-whisper to the dangerous dog, and is surrounded by more genuine types, like the stable girl with cow-dung-caked bare feet. His host, Frau Schweigestill (the names are always relevant - hers could be a German translation of horse-whisperer) is not particularly well-educated, but – it turns out – has had a string of unusual guests in her house, either very eccentric ones, or suffering some kind of terrible life-curse, Leverkühn obviously being the culmination. She has understood perfectly how to deal with them, with her natural intelligence, and without bourgeois judgement.

Zeitblom rails against the Reformation, for its insistence on a literal reading of sacred texts, thus not allowing space for the magic of the act of faith (although Mann was brought up a Lutheran, this seems to be a parallel to the critique of bourgeois constrictions). He also blames it for triggering the Wars of Religion, by taking an utterly unforgiving, no-quarter-given-or-taken approach to the truth of religion, as interpreted from foundational texts. The creation of a myth of truth, and of destiny, and the dogmatic pursuit of it – this is also a parallel of the Third Reich.

Nazism indeed weighs heavily on the book. Zeitblom repeatedly reminds us to bear in mind the time he is writing about (Leverkühn's time, before, during and after the First World War) and the time he is writing in (World War Two). As a further layer of distancing (it feels like Brechtian Verfremdung) he reminds us that Mann is writing about Zeitblom writing about Leverkühn, for example through the cheekily self-referential “but I am not writing a novel...”. Is Mann asking us to wish madness, genius and inspiration to be channelled into artistic creation, because if they are directed along other paths – for example, to the pained, fevered striving for the realisation of a nation's manifest destiny – the consequences can be indescribably terrible? But if the aim of bourgeois society is to set constraints on madness and non-conformist behaviour, this can just as easily crush artistic endeavour, as provide a bulwark against genocidal political tendencies. This dilemma is not fully resolved, and it can be assumed that Mann does not want to provide all the answers.

As a footnote, Arnold Schoenberg, Mann's friend, whose music – and genius – were an inspiration for the novel, was upset at its publication. Mann's ambitions were grand, of course – his theme was the nature of genius itself, not specifically Schoenberg's. But, like Zeitblom, surely Mann exhibited an emotional blindness by not foreseeing his friend's anger. "Dear Arnold - here is my novel, a tribute to your genius, where I lay out various possible theories for its origin - a syphilitic infection, madness, a pact with the devil, a repressed Oedipus complex ..." Finally, after the first publication, he felt compelled to write a very brief afterword where he explains that the musical theory in the book is drawn from Schoenberg, implying that this was the only connection. ...more

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Feb 16, 2008 Adam rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Lovers of Classical Music and German History

Mann is Teutonic Melville, and like Moby-Dick this book is filled with digressions and discussions alongside the unavoidable plunge toward madness and doom. These digressions interweave the narrative with images of Dante’s Inferno, Dürer woodcuts, puppet theater, fairy tales, German culture during the period through the World Wars, lengthy discussions of Classical music, and apocalyptic and prophetic literature. Written in the waning of the Second World War as the narrator tries to understand th ...more

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Jan 13, 2017 Ana rated it it was amazing

Patience. That's the word.

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Sep 08, 2020 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: german-austrian-swiss

Brilliant. Challenging. Enlightening. Disturbing. A work of art.

I had not read Thomas Mann, neither the Magic Mountain nor Buddenbrook, then I saw over the course of the last year several fine reviews pertaining to this book. Then Kalliope’s musical entity stirred me to get the book from my library.

Brilliant. I am familiar with Goethe’s version but this one works on a different level. In fact the various levels at play here reveal Mann’s brilliance.

Mann himself fled Germany during the war to Am Brilliant. Challenging. Enlightening. Disturbing. A work of art.

I had not read Thomas Mann, neither the Magic Mountain nor Buddenbrook, then I saw over the course of the last year several fine reviews pertaining to this book. Then Kalliope’s musical entity stirred me to get the book from my library.

Brilliant. I am familiar with Goethe’s version but this one works on a different level. In fact the various levels at play here reveal Mann’s brilliance.

Mann himself fled Germany during the war to America, where he wrote this book. The narrator is Serenus Zeitblom, a professor of Greek and Latin, who is retelling the story of his friend and composer Adrian Leverkühn, just as Germany itself is collapsing at the end of World War II. Leverkühn, driven to be a leading German composer of the twentieth century makes a deal with devil to live another 24 years.

So we have a multitude of stories at play. One of music; the other of history. One of friendship; one of betrayal. One of culture; one of barbarism.

Challenging. The hardest part was the descriptions of music. Although I can read music and have a good knowledge, Mann’s pushes this to extremes and his famous chapter 24, on twelve tone was beautiful and baffling. Schoenberg comes to mind. One almost needs a musical listen after each description. But just as music is about structure, so is this a complicated book. There are a lot of characters, sub stories and yet, it all unfolds nicely.

Enlightening. The one characteristic that defines the a German character, according to this book, is to strive for perfection. In this case, music. Germans have a long history of great composers, with Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Mann teaches us all about this facet of German culture, from folk tales, nursery rhymes to the great pieces. Encompassing one might say.

Disturbing. And of course, this leads to that most horrible of things, when one strives to be perfect, others are lesser than you. In a competition, there are losers. And what do you do with the losers? Class, culture, elitism leads to distaste, snobbery and a view of superiority. We are not just speaking of rivalry between composers.

A work of art. In some sense, the arts are part of the problem just as much as the political issues that brought the Nazi’s to power. Thomas Mann writes with brutal conviction. The thousand year reich was a failure. They made a terrible mistake. They didn’t know when to stop. They cut a deal with the devil one may say and it ends badly. “Alles ist schlecht” one might say. Not this book.

This was not planned but it fits nicely in after reading “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Maybe we need works of art to teach us to be humble. Or at least, to be human. ...more

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Nov 14, 2017 Forrest rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It took me nine months to read this book, and now I'm supposed to summarize it in a review limited to 20,000 characters? Pah! I don't dare even attempt it! Many others have outlined the plot (such as it is) and explored in greater detail than that of which I am capable, the parallels between the story and Mann's bout of cultural guilt over the Third Reich. Anything I say about this would only serve to expose how much I did not understand about this novel. And because I didn't understand the enti It took me nine months to read this book, and now I'm supposed to summarize it in a review limited to 20,000 characters? Pah! I don't dare even attempt it! Many others have outlined the plot (such as it is) and explored in greater detail than that of which I am capable, the parallels between the story and Mann's bout of cultural guilt over the Third Reich. Anything I say about this would only serve to expose how much I did not understand about this novel. And because I didn't understand the entirety of this novel, I will present my thoughts scattershot, with little or no context, as I don't have the capacity to provide it. My reading of this book, like my reading of Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, has left a great gaping void where my brain used to reside, but a void more capable of being filled now, because of the beautiful trauma that has been inflicted therein.

Since I am ill-equipped to address the slow-burning, then fast-burning plot, the emotionally deep and most-often tragic characters, or even the many clever uses of metafictional technique throughout, I will concentrate, quite simply, on one of the central conceits of the novel: the music of the composer, Adrian Leverkuhn.

Mann has caught my innermost feelings regarding what I will call "avant-classical" music. The sort composed by Ligeti, Penderecki, Part, Crumb, Xenakis, Schnittke, and Stockhausen. I have a perverse love of this seemingly-nihilistic music, a certain spiteful soft-spot for the naughtiness of it all. The brooding goth that lives behind my heart delights in the sheer transgressiveness of the music, while I take great intellectual interest at the same time, a real fascination that I can't explain, but is a core part of my deep life. It's a mixture of fear and delight, a rarefied emotional state that makes me feel connected with the rest of the cold, dark universe. Mann's prose, while not directly explaining the feelings I feel when I'm listening to such music, hints at them in a sidelong way:

Contagious diseases, plague, black death, were probably not of this planet; as, almost certainly indeed, life itself has not its origin on our glove, but came hither from outside. He, Adrian, had it on the best authority that it came from neighbouring stars which are enveloped in an atmosphere more favourable to it, containing much methane and ammonia, like Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. From them, or from one of them - he left me the choice - life had once, borne by cosmic projectiles or simply by radiation pressure, arrived upon our formerly sterile and innocent planet. My humanistic homo Dei, that crowning achievement of life, was together with his obligations to the spiritual in all probability the product of the marsh-gas fertility of a neighbouring star.

"The flower of evil," I repeated, nodding.

"And blooming mostly in mischief," he added.

Thus he taunted me, not only with my kindly view of the world, but also by persisting in the whimsical pretence of a personal, direct, and special knowledge about the affairs of heaven and earth. I did not know, but I might have been able to tell myself, that all this meant something, meant a new work: namely, the cosmic music which he had in his mind, after the episode of the new songs. It was the amazing symphony in one movement, the orchestral fantasy that he was working out during the last months of 1913 and the first of 1914, and which very much against my expressed wish bore the title Marvels of the Universe. I was mistrustful of the flippancy of that name and suggested the title Symphonia cosmologica. But Adrian insisted, laughing, on the other, mock-pathetic, ironic name, which certainly better prepared the knowing for the out-and-out bizarre and unpleasant character of the work, even though often these images of the monstrous and uncanny were grotesque in a solemn, formal, mathematical way.

-And again:

. . . a barbaric rudiment from pre-musical days, is the gliding voice, the glissando, a device to be used with the greatest restraint on profoundly cultural grounds; I have always been inclined to sense in it an anti-cultural, anti-human appeal. What I have in mind is Leverkuhn's preference for the glissando. Of course "preference" is not the right word; I only mean that at least in this work, the Apocalypse, he makes exceptionally frequent use of it, and certainly these images of terror offer a most tempting and at the same time most legitimate occasion for the employment of that savage device. In the place where the four voices of the altar order the letting loose of the four avenging angels, who mow down rider and steed, Emperor and Pope, and a third of mankind, how terrifying is the effect of the trombone glissandos which here represent the theme! This destructive sliding through the seven positions of the instrument! The theme represented by howling - what horror! And what acoustic panic results from the repeated drum-glissandos, and effect made possible on the chromatic or machine drum by changing the tuning to various pitches during the drum-roll. The effect is extremely uncanny. But most shattering of all is the application of the glissando to the human voice, which after all was the first target in organizing the tonic material and ridding song of its primitive howling over several notes: the rerun, in short, to this primitive stage, as the chorus of the Apocalypse does it in the form of frightfully shrieking human voices at the opening of the seventh seal, when the sun became black and the moon became as blood and the ships are overturned.

My dark fascination was inflamed as I read and recognized that Mann could convey that which I could not, my love of that dark, mysterious music. His ability to put into words, albeit indirectly, the feelings I feel when listening to this color of music, is, frankly, astounding. And while there were some sections on music theory that baffled me, there were long stretches of prose that enveloped me. The existentialist in me is in love with a good portion of this book. I can see myself hiding in its shadows frequently. Or maybe I can't see myself at all. And maybe that's the point.
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Dec 22, 2015 Hugh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: translations, modern-classics, read-2016

A daunting masterwork which I feel hopelessly unqualified to describe, this is in part a retelling of the Faust legend, in part a meditation on the nature of classical music, genius and creativity, and part an inditement of Mann's Germany at the time of its creation, in the latter stages and immediate aftermath of the Second World War, centred on the life of an imaginary radical German composer of the early 20th century, told by a friend who knew him from his schooldays.

I was prompted to read i ...more

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Feb 16, 2017 K.M. Weiland rated it really liked it

What an extraordinary book. Thomas Mann—even translated into English—has such an immersive and yet easy style of writing. He’s a pleasure to read even when he’s not saying anything interesting, which he certainly is here with this deeply symbolic web of personality and history. Most interesting of all, however, is his deft use of a highly unreliable but entirely earnest non-protagonist narrator. I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as Magic Mountain, but it cements Mann as one of my favorite classi ...more

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Mar 11, 2014 Megan Baxter rated it really liked it

My initial reaction to being done this book is relief. Like the other Thomas Mann book I've read, I've found this a slog at times. It was one where I had to give myself permission to read around 20 pages a day and no more, or else I never would have sat down with it in the first place. But despite that, despite how long it took me to read, and how I was never quite eager to get back to it, I am glad I read it. A difficult read, but still, a worthwhile one.

Note: The rest of this review has been w ...more

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Aug 07, 2013 Stephen Durrant rated it really liked it

I hardly ever give up on a novel. Somehow I always hear my late mother's voice telling me to "bite off more than you can chew and chew it." Well, Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus" was perhaps more than I could chew, but at least I kept chewing to the end. And I'm glad I did. As all Mann readers know, his books can be terribly slow and sometimes maddeningly ponderous, but I invariably reach the final page, having resisted the inclination to throw the book aside forever, feeling that my time has been I hardly ever give up on a novel. Somehow I always hear my late mother's voice telling me to "bite off more than you can chew and chew it." Well, Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus" was perhaps more than I could chew, but at least I kept chewing to the end. And I'm glad I did. As all Mann readers know, his books can be terribly slow and sometimes maddeningly ponderous, but I invariably reach the final page, having resisted the inclination to throw the book aside forever, feeling that my time has been well spent, that I have been challenged and have learned something. Not every reader will see "Doctor Faustus" as I do--I would describe it as a "love story." It is presented as a biography of a genius composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, who is loosely modeled after Arnold Schoenberg. The central character, however, is Serenius Zeitbloom, the learned author of the biography and the first person narrator. At the root of this "biography," as with other Mann works, is homo-erotic attraction, masked as in "Death in Venice," behind an overwrought worship of aesthetic beauty. Adrian, whom Serenius worships for his astounding musical creations, believes he has sold his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of musical genius. He is, to be sure, a dark genius who is struggling to produce a new music, wavering between objective, "automatic" composition, and total subjectivity. We see his struggles through the eyes of the adoring narrator, at times overcome with jealousy, who may not always see his dear friend clearly. All this makes for a complicated and multi-layered work. But perhaps most important to understanding the novel is the fact that the narrator is producing this "biography" (and, of course, Mann is producing this novel) just as the Third Reich is crumbling. In the end, we realize that this is a love story not just of the narrator for Adrian, who has sold his soul to the devil, but for a Germany, symbolized by Adrian, that has indulged its worst qualities and is bound now, Serenius believes, to suffer eternally for its sins. ...more

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Aug 09, 2009 Josh rated it it was ok

Dry. Mann writes several engaging passages concerning his characters and plot which hold the reader's attention. They are very good. But most of this book is him expostulating about music theory, German religious history and other random subjects in the most complex language possible. The book seems almost hostile in how much it requires the reader to work to follow tangents that really do not make the story progress. It made me very mad. I actually punched the book. Maybe I'm over-emotional. Ma ...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Larou added it · review of another edition

Doktor Faustus is – besides Zauberberg and the Josef novels – one of Thomas Mann’s great novels (and yes I’m aware that most people would add Buddenbrooks to that list or even have it solely consist of that novel – for my part, however, I think it is very overrated and one of Mann’s lesser efforts) – and has a reputation of being inaccessible even by his standards. This reputation is not completely undeserved, it is a complex and difficult book and takes some effort to get into – on the other ha ...more

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May 03, 2012 Justin Evans rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction

I read this when I was an undergrad; you remember, back when it was great fun to torture yourself by reading 500 page books you could barely understand? Loved it.

I flatter myself that I understood much more this time round: the way that the two levels of time interact (the narrator writes in the closing year of world war two, the story takes place in the twenties); the music theory and, much more importantly, modernist aesthetic theory; the reflections of those theories in the book (two charact I read this when I was an undergrad; you remember, back when it was great fun to torture yourself by reading 500 page books you could barely understand? Loved it.

I flatter myself that I understood much more this time round: the way that the two levels of time interact (the narrator writes in the closing year of world war two, the story takes place in the twenties); the music theory and, much more importantly, modernist aesthetic theory; the reflections of those theories in the book (two characters discuss pastiche as a means of restoring expression to modern art, then the narrator tells us a more or less pointless love story involving two minor characters); the surely ironic extended descriptions that remind you of Mann's older realistic style but fall completely flat and seem pointless when placed next to Leverkuehn's demonic genius; the nods to German literary history (obviously Goethe's Faust, but also the bildungsroman); the skill with which Mann shows that the narrator's 'humanism' is open to the Fuhrer-principle even while he remains antipathetic to Nazism; the levels of irony as the 'point' floats between the genuine appeal of the modern Faust, the narrator, and the implied author.

Thing is, it's not as affecting as Buddenbrooks, not as funny as Magic Mountain. It comes off as a bit of a tour-de-force, full of fascinating seminar-room discussion material but lacking any real sense that there are people in the story rather than ideas. Now, I love books that are full of seminar-room discussion material. And I'm willing to believe that this lack of emotion and humor (the narrator reminds us constantly that he has no sense of humor, although that in itself gets pretty funny) is the final twist of Mann's irony: Leverkuehn is a genius whose works will never be listened to by any except a tiny minority who can compute what he's doing, and Doctor Faustus is a novel which can't be read properly except by a tiny minority who can compute what it's doing. The fact that it falls flat tells us something about the dangers of modernist art and its incessant reflexivity. At the same time it tells us a lot about the glories of modernist art and its incessant reflexivity. ...more

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Aug 31, 2015 Greg Brozeit rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: deutsch, german-fiction

I so wanted to like this book, especially after reading a Goodreads friend's review. It had languished on my shelves for decades. I was scared of it. Once I started reading, like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it ended up becoming an albatross. But I wasn’t going to quit. Not so sure that was the right decision now that I’m done. I went to Venice with Mann, but that was years ago and I not tempted to go anywhere else with him. Perhaps I’m missing something and just don’t get it, but I can live ...more

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Oct 10, 2009 Eric rated it it was amazing

It was only a matter of time before I re-read Mann's Dr. Faustus, one of the handful of novels that made me a lifelong reader of literary fiction. Besides, Alex Ross kept mentioning it in "The Rest Is Noise," which I took up about a month or so ago, an excellent book in its own right, tho hardly literary fiction, details of which to follow.

Mann writes the unwriteable, expresses the inexpressable and does the undoable. Not only does he manage to capture and communicate the notoriously difficult a ...more

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Feb 16, 2017 Bill rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: male-author, started-gave-up, lit-fiction, fiction, 1001-books, translations, over-500-pages

Just found this really heavy going.

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Oct 02, 2012 Michael Austin rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2013

I turned to Doctor Faustus to remedy two major deficiencies in my intellectual development. First, I had never read anything by Thomas Mann. I have started "Death in Venice" a few times, but it just never stuck. Second, and perhaps more embarrassingly, I have never been able to understand any but the earliest of Schoenberg's compositions. I don't get twelve-tone music. It sounds like people tuning their instruments. Since I have always been patently incapable of understanding atonal music as mus I turned to Doctor Faustus to remedy two major deficiencies in my intellectual development. First, I had never read anything by Thomas Mann. I have started "Death in Venice" a few times, but it just never stuck. Second, and perhaps more embarrassingly, I have never been able to understand any but the earliest of Schoenberg's compositions. I don't get twelve-tone music. It sounds like people tuning their instruments. Since I have always been patently incapable of understanding atonal music as music, and even worse understanding it as math, I decided to try to understand it as narrative.

Faustus is a remarkably complex novel. It is part morality tale, part Faust legend, part aesthetic criticism, and part social critique. And the best thing is that all of these different strands of the novel use the same formal elements in different ways--creating something that, I suspect, resembles the thematic elements of a musical composition.

I have read most of the other major entries in the "Faust Legend" category, including Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Goethe's Faust, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Mann's Mephistopheles character (who may or may not be all in the protagonist's mind) is very similar to Goethe's and Bulgakov's. But his major protagonist--Adrian Leverkühn--is very different. Unlike other Faust-types, Leverkühn does not want knowledge, experience, or immortality--or even to win baseball games. He wants, rather, to be a truly great artist, not to enjoy fame or wealth (both of which he disdains), but to effect, but the sheer force of his creative power, a monumental shift in the world of musical composition.

For reasons that I do not quite understand, Mann chose to use Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositional system as the basis of Leverkühn's musical accomplishment. Schoenberg, I know, was not too happy about this, but novelist's of Mann's stature are not supposed to make people happy. The new system of tonality is perhaps the most intriguing symbol in the novel's rich allegorical tapestry. On the one hand, it stands for great aesthetic accomplishment, but in another allegorical sense, it stands for the dissolution of traditional culture--almost as if Mann is warning us that a radical intellectualization of the aesthetic experience has the power to knock us off of our cultural moorings and lead directly to. . . .

Well, Nazis. The rise and fall of National Socialism is a major context of the novel. The events that it narrates take place well before Hitler's rise to power, but the narrator himself (Leverkühn's Nick Carroway-esque friend Serenus Zeitblom) is writing the story in the mid-1940s, and many of his narrative interpolations describe the state of the Third Reich at the end of the war. The whole selling-one's soul-to-the-devil theme of the novel must, at some level, be read as an allegory of Germany's embrace of Hitler. And the atonal compositional system, therefore, must be somehow equated with the dissolution of artistic and cultural standards that should have prevented it.

At the same time, though, the story is an allegory of what the truly great artist has to give up (in Leverkühn's case, the devil requires him to give up human love). And these allegories cannot possibly be resolved into a single category of assertions (the way that, say, the various allegories in The Divine Comedy all work in basically the same direction, or, at least, never contradict each other). Adrian Leverkühn is a tragic hero, but he is also an epic hero, with the conquest of tonal music as his most profound heroic accomplishment. His system of music is both the culmination of the European tradition and the destruction of the same. The essence of Mann's art, I believe, is in the power to work a single set of symbolic concepts through so many different layers of allegory without ever providing a moral tonal center that we can use to resolve the ambiguities. This, I suspect, is the essence of both musical and literary genius.

That said, I still don't get twelve-tone composition. During the three weeks that it took me to read Doctor Faustus, I listened obsessively to Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Only the last of these ever really resonated with me. Schoenberg still sounds like people tuning their instruments.
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Dec 15, 2013 Marc rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: german-literature

After reading The Magic Mountain, this was a disappointment. More than 300 pages too long. Some parts are not functional in the story. A little storyline, unnecessarely blown up to big proportions. The link with the evolution of Germany is uninspiring. Only in the end, there was some literary firework. My bad?

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Jun 05, 2007 Frederick rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mann-thomas, novels, magisterial

I read the translation by H. T. Lowe-Porter. She worked with Thomas Mann. I think she captures his tone better than later translators. Then again, I don't know German, which was the in which Mann wrote. But, every so often I compare some of the translations. I still hear a particular voice when I read Lowe-Porter's phrases. From her translations I get a sense of Thomas Mann as a sort of diligent, puckish, sometimes aggressive writer. I read the edition published by Knopf, with the great photo of I read the translation by H. T. Lowe-Porter. She worked with Thomas Mann. I think she captures his tone better than later translators. Then again, I don't know German, which was the in which Mann wrote. But, every so often I compare some of the translations. I still hear a particular voice when I read Lowe-Porter's phrases. From her translations I get a sense of Thomas Mann as a sort of diligent, puckish, sometimes aggressive writer. I read the edition published by Knopf, with the great photo of Mann on the back. His face is in profile and the vein in his temple stands out in jagged sharpness. A biography said this was a sign of his having migraine headaches. In any case, this grand master of prose wore a bow tie and looked, for all the world, like a music critic.
DOCTOR FAUSTUS is a sustained meditation on music. I learned more about musical endeavor reading this novel than I ever have reading nonfiction accounts of musicians. You can hear this music as you read. (God knows I wouldn't want to hear it in real life.) The main character -- well, the main character is actually the narrator, who is ostensibly writing a biography of his friend, a composer, but for the sake of argument I'll say this composer is the main character -- makes a pact with Satan, as so many guys who get called Faust do. In the book, his name is Adrian Leverkuhn. Mann had to write a disclaimer after Arnold Schoenberg noticed that the twelve-tone scheme described in the novel matched his own musical contribution, but Mann's disclaimer is so gracefully condescending in Lowe-Porter's translation that it is obvious Schoenberg's music was what Mann had in mind.
If the following names ring a bell, then you'll find this novel absorbing: Gustav Mahler, Friedrich Nietsche, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Albert Einstein, Alfred Einstein, Alma Mahler and, indeed, Thomas Mann. These are not characters in the novel, although Nietsche is discussed, but their minds inform every page. This is a book about the colossal Nordic intellect of the early twentieth century and its destruction at the hands of the Nazis. Hitler is never mentioned, although at one point someone, without knowing it, sports the style of mustache which, in the not-too-distant future, would be worn by "a very famous face."
Essentially, Mann is saying Germany bowed to a satanic impulse after the First World War and forsook its own incredibly sophisticated culture (a culture of Goethe, Beethoven and Mozart)for that of history's most notorious despot.
Mann fled Germany in the early thirties and, while writing the four-volume JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, travelled through Europe, finally getting refuge in the United States. DOCTOR FAUSTUS, one of the most damning books about the decline of Europe, was written in Pacific Palisades, California.
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Boxall's 1001 Bo...: June {2018} Group Read -- DOCTOR FAUSTUS by Thomas Mann	10	101	Feb 12, 2019 07:58AM
Reading 1001: Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann	1	13	Jun 21, 2018 09:37AM
Goodreads Librari...: Correct page count and other info	3	13	Mar 30, 2018 01:20PM

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Preview — Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Doctor Faustus

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Preview — Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Doctor Faustus

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Genres

About Thomas Mann

Books by Thomas Mann

News & Interviews

Trivia About Doctor Faustus

Quotes from Doctor Faustus

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Discuss This Book