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Francisca Urria franciscaurria — Great, humorous mystery novel. I started at 10 and couldn't stop reading until I finished it 4 hours later. I have to know whodunnit in mystery novels! The writing class element was funny and really well done. Thank goodness that sort of thing didn't happen in the writing classes I've been in!

Linh Linh 2111linhng5da9 — I read the translation by H. T. Lowe-Porter. She worked with Thomas Mann. I think she captures his tone better than later translators. Then again, I don't know German, which was the in which Mann wrote. But, every so often I compare some of the translations. I still hear a particular voice when I read Lowe-Porter's phrases. From her translations I get a sense of Thomas Mann as a sort of diligent, puckish, sometimes aggressive writer. I read the edition published by Knopf, with the great photo of Mann on the back. His face is in profile and the vein in his temple stands out in jagged sharpness. A biography said this was a sign of his having migraine headaches. In any case, this grand master of prose wore a bow tie and looked, for all the world, like a music critic. DOCTOR FAUSTUS is a sustained meditation on music. I learned more about musical endeavor reading this novel than I ever have reading nonfiction accounts of musicians. You can hear this music as you read. (God knows I wouldn't want to hear it in real life.) The main character -- well, the main character is actually the narrator, who is ostensibly writing a biography of his friend, a composer, but for the sake of argument I'll say this composer is the main character -- makes a pact with Satan, as so many guys who get called Faust do. In the book, his name is Adrian Leverkuhn. Mann had to write a disclaimer after Arnold Schoenberg noticed that the twelve-tone scheme described in the novel matched his own musical contribution, but Mann's disclaimer is so gracefully condescending in Lowe-Porter's translation that it is obvious Schoenberg's music was what Mann had in mind. If the following names ring a bell, then you'll find this novel absorbing: Gustav Mahler, Friedrich Nietsche, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Albert Einstein, Alfred Einstein, Alma Mahler and, indeed, Thomas Mann. These are not characters in the novel, although Nietsche is discussed, but their minds inform every page. This is a book about the colossal Nordic intellect of the early twentieth century and its destruction at the hands of the Nazis. Hitler is never mentioned, although at one point someone, without knowing it, sports the style of mustache which, in the not-too-distant future, would be worn by "a very famous face." Essentially, Mann is saying Germany bowed to a satanic impulse after the First World War and forsook its own incredibly sophisticated culture (a culture of Goethe, Beethoven and Mozart)for that of history's most notorious despot. Mann fled Germany in the early thirties and, while writing the four-volume JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, travelled through Europe, finally getting refuge in the United States. DOCTOR FAUSTUS, one of the most damning books about the decline of Europe, was written in Pacific Palisades, California.