Word: faustus
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...DOCTOR FAUSTUS (510 pp.)-Thomas Mann-Knopf...
...poll of the world's literary critics, Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann would probably win the nomination as the greatest living novelist. He would not, however, win any prizes as the most read-or most readable. His ninth and latest novel, Dr. Faustus, is probably his most difficult. A November co-choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club,* Dr. Faustus is a challenge to the club's membership, who will find it a chewy mouthful after some of the literary pap they have been fed recently...
Ostensibly Faustus is the biography-in-progress of a fictitious German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who was born in 1885 and died insane in 1940. The biography is being written during World War II by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a professor, a dedicated parlor humanist and a typically humorless academic product of pre-Hitler German Kultur. This combination of dates, musical genius and philosophical reflection gives Mann, as his old readers could easily guess, a chance to air his views on such Mannish concerns as the problem of the artist in society, the free play of mind...
...Before long, Adrian had secretly mastered the keyboard, discovered double counterpoint on his own and become the apple of the local music teacher's eye. Author Mann, who played the violin as a boy, held long conversations with his friends Igor Stravinsky and Bruno Walter as "research" for Faustus, and has packed his book with an impressive and at times annoying display of musical knowledge that will be over the heads of most readers...
Mann's habit of interspersing long, solemn, gratuitous essays on culture, humanism, the German temperament and other intellectual matters throughout his story puts too many distractions between Adrian and the reader. But it is also true that some of the most brilliant writing in Faustus comes in these unexpected asides. The section describing Adrian's deal with the Devil (he sells himself body & soul for 24 years of creative greatness) is a tour de force-translated from archaic German into archaic English-that is a unique reading experience in or out of context. So is the subtle, near...