Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian LeverKuhn as told… (1947)

When I was about sixteen, I had one of those moments of mad inspiration and decided that I was going to sort out German literature once and for all. I got a pile of German books out of the library, made it as far as page 5 of Doktor Faustus, and gave up in despair before even starting on Broch...(*) So, there's a feeling of relief at finally having overcome that hurdle. It took me seven months, on and off, this time, but I think it was worth it.

It is, definitely a difficult book. Mann's prose is beautiful to read, but you have to keep your wits about you to follow the winding path of his long sentences. And he's not someone to use an image where a concept will do: there are more abstract nouns here than in a moderate-sized philosophy library. You have to be ready for long, theoretical discussions about aesthetics, musicology, cultural history, theology, and all the rest. But there is a story under all that, and it does have enough purely narrative interest to carry you through the theory and start to get an inkling of how it all fits together.

It's clearly a book you can read on different levels. It's looking at the Faust legend, it's delving into what we mean by artistic creativity, it's investigating the transition from humanism to modernism, it's playing around with the boundaries of madness and inspiration, it's trying to find a Mercator system that will project music onto literature in a meaningful way. All of those things (and no doubt a lot of others I failed to pick up explicitly) are interesting and important, but the thing that comes over most vividly to me is the way that the book acts as a kind of colloquium on what "Germanness" means to someone living in 1947, at a time when Germans should expect the whole world to be condemning Germany and everything associated with it. Mann, or rather his narrator, Serenus, seems to be addressing the rest of the world, not really being able to envisage a time when Germans will be printing and reading books again. Mann, of course, is writing from exile, but he puts Serenus in the middle of the destruction. Seen from that point of view (and oversimplifying Mann's complex structure almost to the point of absurdity) you could see the story of Serenus and Leverkühn as a confrontation between the reasonable, ordered, liberal-humanist side of German culture and its wilder, more intense and creative, but also vastly more dangerous, self-destructive gothic aspects. Leverkühn buys 24 years of spectacular creativity from the devil (or from an untreated syphilis infection, according to which reading you prefer) and destroys himself; Serenus never explicitly draws the parallel, but I think we are supposed to work out for ourselves that the Nazis get the same amount of time (offset a bit) from their Faustian bargain and end up destroying Germany.

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(*) Fortunately, I then took advice, and started again a little later with something more approachable. ( )

Another constipation-inducing Thomas Mann digested. This was even harder to get through than The Magic Mountain but at least it was half the length. If you’re into the philosophy of musical theory, this is the book for you. I can’t think it’s the book for many though. Granted, Mann has pulled of an astonishing achievement here with his research, his attention to detail and his command of metaphor and allegory. But people in comas are more interesting than long stretches of this.

First of all, it helps to be familiar with the Faust legend. I’m not. Then it helps to be familiar with musical theory. I’m not. Failing that, it helps to have an appreciation of classical music at some level. I don’t. At the very least, you should have some interest in the demise of Nazi Germany. Aha! A hit, a palpable hit.

If it wasn’t for the occasional section that had Mann writing his own feelings of watching his nation be pounded into humiliation by the Allies, I would have rated this book way further down the scale. I found it fascinating that, as the novel was written while the war was ending, I was able to get a rare glimpse into the contemporary German mind.

There is a fictional biography in there too which, like Mountain, is littered with all sorts of characters who make up for their astonishing individual diversity with a common desire to go on picnics and have densely intellectual debates on metaphysics. At least if I’d really accompanied them I could have fallen asleep on the grass and woken up when they were ready to leave. As it is, my eyes kept going while my mind slumbered.

A few interesting things happen to Adrian along the way. There is an encounter with a devil-like figure which is the only place where Mann really lets himself go style-wise. That was worth reading. But on the whole, I found it hard to pick up and easy to put down.

That this book was influential is clear. That this book was a masterpiece is clear. However, you might, like me, come to realise this from reading Wikipedia rather than the book itself. ( )

I confess I have never finished this book. The only one by Mann so far. But not because I couldn't: it's because I don't want to finish it, yet! This is not a mystery novel, so it doesn't really matter whether you read the whole work. There are no surprises, you know form the very beginning what's going on. But every page is a surprise nevertheless. The chapters on Leverkuhn's musical education are unbelievable, and the whole idea of writing about dodecaphonic music as means of expressing the 900's is pure genius. This is one of the few books that should always be next to your bed or wherever you read. I wish I could learn it by heart! ( )

Finally finished this, and well worth the time I put into it. The beginning is the most difficult, with a lot of musical material that was simply beyond me, but I gave it a good try. After the middle, it became a lot easier to read, although still demanding of very close attention. A brilliant book, as a story and (as Mann meant it), a metaphor for the rise and fall of Nazi Germany (it was published in 1947).

This is my second favorite book of all time. It's a portrait of a driven genius coping [as well as he can?] with amoral anomic despair, with German 1940s culture in the background. It is as deep as hell, literally. And it almost leads me to understand music. ( )