Word: manns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...have to learn how to say goodbye," Thomas Mann said to a visitor not long before his death last month. "That is an old man's art." The last novel to leave his pen is a charming show of how well the old man learned that old man's art. It is a gay goodbye-as gay as Mann could ever get. And yet his last words will also provoke serious interpretation. Felix Krull is a picaresque novel, and it stands, looking sometimes a little lump ish, in the raffish succession of The Golden Ass to Don Quixote...
...Volume I, and perhaps none too soon. Krull is surprisingly funny, but at times the humor is as heavy as Kartoffelklosse-and not helped by a translation that misses much of the hero-villain's comic pomposity. The action falls asleep at one point while Mann delivers himself of a monumental snore : a 20-page lecture on the nature of the universe...
Nevertheless, despite its faults, the book is a compelling kind of success. For Mann's writing has, to a degree that few of his contemporaries could equal, what Felix Krull calls "the ineffable power, which there are no words monstrously sweet enough to describe, that teaches the firefly to glow." There comes a moment on almost every page when the words glow, and the reader, charmed, follows the firefly into the dark...
...dark, that is, of the German soul. In Mann's sensibility, the yawning portal of burgher respectability leads only to hell-that same hell in which Nietzsche, lonely and restless, contracted the syphilis that drove him insane, and in which sentimental devotees of Brahms Lieder ran concentration camps...
...Life. Thomas Mann's literary world is one of catastrophic oppositions. As Author Mann developed, the problem took many forms-the artist v. the bourgeois, the criminal v. society, Nietzsche v. Goethe, disease v. conformity, Asia v. Europe, music v. reason. On one occasion, Mann was able to wed his antitheses into a higher reality. The moment came in the lyric, mysterious "snow scene" in The Magic Mountain, in which substance and accidents, skies and devils dissolve in the "white darkness" of the snow. It was one of the really astounding moments in modern literature, but it passed...