Word: manns
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ceaseless attempts to fill all the chinks and crannies through which the innumerable misfortunes of life might enter. The life of Joseph's mind, supple, varied, quick, humorous, was a constant preoccupation with religious problems so difficult that their very statement is tedious to the plain reader. Thomas Mann makes it plain that Joseph was a great religious poet. For, among many other things, Mann's Joseph is a portrait of the artist as a God-guided egoist...
...deliberateness, digression and slow tempo are more marked in Joseph the Provider than in the previous volumes. It is the most difficult reading of all the Joseph books. Much of Joseph the Provider is given over to recapitulations of parts of the earlier books, with Author Mann's discussions of the manifold meanings of the incidents, the legends, and the motives of the characters...
...lacks the intense excitement of the scenes in which Joseph was cast into the pit, then sold into slavery (Young Joseph), or the intensity of the amorous scenes with Potiphar's wife (Joseph in Egypt). But while it is written with the deliberately pedantic humor in which Mann casts his cosmic irony, Joseph the Provider is so lucid that the magnificent flow of its prose may well be overlooked...
...likely to enjoy this big book only when they have looked back upon the immense pattern of the story, the array of characters-Joseph himself, his father, Jacob, his brothers, the scribes and stewards of Egypt, the courtly eunuch Potiphar, his sexually frustrated wife, the two dwarfs (in whom Mann personifies the principles of ineffectual goodness and potent evil), Pharaoh, the sermons of the bald-pated Egyptian priests, the astronomy, history, architecture, concepts of life & death-and the similarities and differences in the ancient legends of different people that Mann delights...
...Mann was first attracted to the Joseph legend because it seemed a perfect story. It turned out to be so perfect in its infinite human implications that, when Mann finished, he had written the story of a story of a story of a story. Step by step, Joseph the Provider is hard going. But from time to time, on the book's Saharan horizons, loom rich oases of pure storytelling-some as long as a novel...