But generally I was surprised how immersive this was, how quickly I entered the world of the story and lived with this middle-late 1880s generation. In Buddenbrooks, there’s the sort of transgenerational family saga he returns to thirty years later in Joseph and His Bros, specializing in sibling conflict Hanno and his mah’s musical obsession echoes Doctor Faustus in advance - the super-descriptive pages toward the very end relaying young Johann’s improvisation on piano pulled out the prose stops, suggesting the confounded turbulence of youth, including in Hanno’s case the suggestion of a desire to get with his cool friend Kai (I’m sure Mann’s novels have launched hundreds of dissertations exploring his portraits of restrained sexuality) there’s illness as in The Magic Mountain, particularly Christian’s case. I love the thematic overlap among these novels. Of the four “major” Mann novels (plus the famous novella about the chicken hawk who dyes his hair, which I read 10 years ago translated by someone other than Woods or Michael Henry Heim - we should really all write to Woods and ask him to translate the “stories of three decades”), I’d rank this ahead of neck-and-neck third and fourth place finishers Doctor Faustus and The Magic Mountain, but behind the monumental achievement of Joseph and His Brothers, the importance/impact of which deepens in my mind now that a year or so has passed since I read it. Woods’s sensibility and super-steady, elastic, attentive prose style. But I didn’t actually read Mann’s text - Mann comes to me filtered through John E. Can’t imagine a current undergrad publishing something like this in a few years.
Published in 1901 when dude was like 26 years old. Bra-evffin’-oh, young Mann - I’m pretty sure this breaks the world record for precocious achievement of towering literary artistry.
0 kommentar(er)
