Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend (The New John Woods Translation) (Vintage International) [Paperback]

 

 

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Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann is a challenging work, monumental in conception. Many of its 525 pages are not easy to read, especially the ones dealing with the theory and history of music to those not familiar with this subject. The discussion of modern and classical music is inevitable as Adrian Leverkuhn, the main character in the book, is said to be a great composer.

This novel is said to an "allegory of the rise and fall of the Third Reich", but what does that actually mean? The way I understand it is that Mann asks himself the question, how is it that the nation which produced the sublime music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven also produced Hitler and the horrors of the Holocaust? His novel is an artistic attempt at finding an answer to this question. For this purpose, Mann makes use of the legend and myth of Faustus, the man who is said to have sold his soul to the Devil -Precarious territory to negotiate in an age when those of intellectual standing don't believe in the Devil. In Mann's balancing act he makes use of his narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, a close friend of Adrian. Zeitblom was born a Roman Catholic, but now considers himself a Humanist, whereas Adrian is born to a Lutheran family.

According to Zeitblom's account, Adrian firmly believes that he has sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the ability to compose great music. It is worth quoting Adrian's own words here: "It is an age when no work is to be done in pious sober fashion and by proper means, and art has grown impossible sans the Devil's aid and hellish fire beneath the kettle......art is stuck fast and grown too difficult and mocks its very self, that all has grown too difficult..." The age he is referring to is the period after the First World War when Germany is resentfully licking its wounds of defeat, and the despair and turmoil in that country provides the fertile soil for the rise of Nazism.

Zeitblom gives us a description of the last work composed by Adrian, an oratorio entitled The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus. He says that the climactic passage of this work could be described as an "Ode to Sorrow", a lamentation, in contrast to Beethoven's Ode to Joy. "There is no doubt that he wrote it with an eye to Beethoven's Ninth, as its counterpart in the most melancholy sense of the word." While Beethoven's symphony may be said to be religious in the conventional sense, Zeitblom suggests that Adrian's work is also religious in a different sense. "A work dealing with the Tempter, with apostasy, with damnation - how can it be anything but a religious work!"

Although Adrian completed this work in 1930, I think Zeitblom (and Mann) is suggesting that he foreshadowed the total destruction of Germany by writing this Lamentation. It is likely that Mann wants us to understand the myth of the Devil in the same way that Herman Melville did less consciously in Moby Dick. Many critics have felt that the Great White Whale represents God, while Captain Ahab is the Devil. In Mann's novel, Adrian is one of the few people living in that era who recognized the demonic forces at work in the human psyche. Those who deny these forces become True Nazis. A Nazi would never admit that he is doing the work of the Devil; he sees himself as a God-like being whose duty it is to purify the human race.

What is the relevance of this message for the 21st century? I think it is that those who are unaware of and deny the demonic forces within themselves become the unconscious instruments of these forces. However, Doctor Faustus is a great work of literature which depicts a concrete reality in the life of its characters, and there are likely to be many possible interpretations.

Well, what can you say? If Felix Krull is the novel that would have perfected Mann's form, Faustus was the one which actually did. The technicality of language and construction of novelistic technique here is like Nabokov tenfold. It is unsurpassed, even by Proust. And while it may lack the sublime artistry of Proust, Mann has his own inimitable style of beauty. The going is very slow, it takes you down two gears as a reader, and then another, as you absorbe all the dense but vague symbolism (that of Germany and her Mephistopheles, Hitler), and the complex character which is based on Schonberg. If you enjoy literature in its perfected form, National Socialist German history, Goethe's Faust legend, or dodecaphonic music, you can do no finer than this.

I really enjoyed reading this book slowly from cover to cover. It can be enjoyed on many levels which makes it accessible for readers of many different backgrounds. I enjoyed it first as a very convincing fictional biography of an early-twentieth century German composer. I later discovered the book's potential to be read as an allegory for Germany's shift to Nazism.

I think the beauty of the writing lies in the way in which Thomas Mann chooses to convey deep psychological truth not through long impenetrable sentences filled with complex vocabulary but with telling descriptions of the nuances in his characters' appearance and physical mannerisms. I find this more 'everyday' language far more enjoyable to read and, for the most part, more effective in conveying meaning.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about German history, German music or anyone who simply wants to be told a good story in sophisticated but not stifling language.

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5.0 out of 5 stars The literary equivalent of a neutron star
I have to give this five stars because its neutronium solid literary credentials are so space-warpingly gravid as to make what I actually think of it hardly relevant, seeing as it... Read more

Published on 11 Jan 2010 by John Ferngrove

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book
I came to this book after reading the fascinating The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which describes the intellectual trajectory of music from... Read more

Published on 27 Jun 2009 by J O

5.0 out of 5 stars The destruction of genius portrayed - in an outstanding translation
I don't find Thomas Mann's books, such as Doctor Faustus at all easy to read. They are both long and highly complex, written not as a novel as such but to transmit a message, in... Read more

Published on 27 April 2008 by A Common Reader

5.0 out of 5 stars Mann's difficult masterpiece
Although translations always take something from the original, those of us who have troubles reading Mann's admittedly difficult German will surely find the reading quite... Read more

Published on 26 July 2001

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