Word: mannes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...poll of the world's literary critics, Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann would probably win the nomination as the greatest living novelist. He would not, however, win any prizes as the most read-or most readable. His ninth and latest novel, Dr. Faustus, is probably his most difficult. A November co-choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club,* Dr. Faustus is a challenge to the club's membership, who will find it a chewy mouthful after some of the literary pap they have been fed recently...
...died insane in 1940. The biography is being written during World War II by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a professor, a dedicated parlor humanist and a typically humorless academic product of pre-Hitler German Kultur. This combination of dates, musical genius and philosophical reflection gives Mann, as his old readers could easily guess, a chance to air his views on such Mannish concerns as the problem of the artist in society, the free play of mind v. regimented thought, the relationship of disease to creative activity and the "German problem," before, during & after Hitler. Faustus can in fact...
Mocking Genius. Mann has chosen no conventionally flashy music-hall prodigy for his case history of a genius. Adrian Leverkühn, as his friend Zeitblom remembers him, was a brilliant, mocking, arrogant schoolboy who, even in his early teens, was constantly throwing off deep remarks. Sample: "Technique and comfort-in that state one talks about culture but one has not got it. Will you prevent me from seeing in the homophone-melodic constitution of our music a condition of musical civilization-in contrast to the old contrapuntal polyphone culture...
...uncle, with whom he lived as a schoolboy, was a dealer in musical instruments. Before long, Adrian had secretly mastered the keyboard, discovered double counterpoint on his own and become the apple of the local music teacher's eye. Author Mann, who played the violin as a boy, held long conversations with his friends Igor Stravinsky and Bruno Walter as "research" for Faustus, and has packed his book with an impressive and at times annoying display of musical knowledge that will be over the heads of most readers...
...Mann's habit of interspersing long, solemn, gratuitous essays on culture, humanism, the German temperament and other intellectual matters throughout his story puts too many distractions between Adrian and the reader. But it is also true that some of the most brilliant writing in Faustus comes in these unexpected asides. The section describing Adrian's deal with the Devil (he sells himself body & soul for 24 years of creative greatness) is a tour de force-translated from archaic German into archaic English-that is a unique reading experience in or out of context. So is the subtle, near...