Current Reading

[Ghetta Life]

Thanks for responding.  I did want others' thoughts on the book.  My 
response is below.

>From: MalignD at aol.com
>
>>Ghetta:
> >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, with 
>the best (but relatively short) part being where the subject of the book 
>has an
encounter with the Devil.
>
>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.

[I separate and number your list of "levels" below]

>[1]  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.

Yes.

>[2]  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.

Yes, but it doesn't have much traction.  It is isolated into a single 
chapter with some passing references to it later on by the narrator.

>[3]  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.

Yes here, too.  In fact the novel spans both World Wars, with the narrator 
enthusiastically serving in the first.  Another component of the book 
related to this one is the narrator account of the lives of the cultured 
community surrounding him and Leverkuhn.  This examines the roots of the 
mind-set that encouraged the Nazi rise.

But my real criticism of the book is that the three "levels" of the book are 
completely separate from each other.  None (except the narrator's 
examination of his community and his feelings about the rise of the Nazis) 
really informs any of the others.  The Devils pact has no relation to the 
description of the music other than that it was dark and genius.  Nor does 
the pact or the genius's life have any apparent connection to the rise of 
the Nazis.  "Brilliant" would have been to show the genius's development 
somehow paralleling, informing, (or even causing) the rise and fall of the 
Third Reich.  But, alas, no connection of any kind is made.  If fact the 
narrator knows almost nothing about the interior thoughts of the genius he 
describes because Leverkuhn is so famously private and distant in all his 
interactions.  So we have a book with nice components but nearly no 
interaction between them.

Ghetta

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