Current Reading

[MalignD at aol.com]

> <<Speaking of novel those on this list are currently reading, right now I'm 
> nearing the end of Thomas Mann's +Faustus*.  I'd say it's not great 
> literature (maybe the translation's partly at fault).  It drags a bit, withthe best 
> (but relatively short) part being where the subject of the book has an 
> encounter with the Devil.  Most of the rest is pedestrian accounts of 
> thecircumstances surrounding the lives of the various characters who revolve around the 
> book's subject.  I expect I'll read *Magic Mountain*, which I hear is a superior 
> work to *Faustus*>>
> 
I read Faustus many years ago (not since) and found it brilliant.   I've 
been, on re-reading, dismayed by my own earlier enthusiasms before but, that 
caveat offered, I found the book engaging on many levels.   Leverkuhn (is that the 
composer's name?) is based mainly on Schoenberg and the musical aspect of the 
novel--the understanding of serial music, etc. is very well rendered.   And 
the retelling of the Faust myth via the composer's having syphillis and going 
mad--thus hallucinating the pact with the devil--was an inspired idea.   Most 
moving was the book's narrator's (and, I think Mann's) meditations on being an 
anti-Nazi German during WWII, the admission that he was ambivalent about German 
(Nazi) defeat: the confession that   German nationalism had been contaminated 
by the third reich, but not eliminated.   I thought it honest and, in its 
time and place, great.


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