Rating: 
Summary: A Book for all the Ages
Review: Unfortunately I don't know German well enough to be able to read Mann in the original, but I find the translation by Helen Lowe-Porter (not the one by Woods, which I have never seen) to be admirable. For as long as there are humans able to read, this monument of a book will bear witness to Mann's age, a glorious epoch marking the zenith of Western culture, in the artistic form best suited to it. This is a high and wonderful achievement. This novel, ostensibly a biography of the great composer Adrian Leverku"hn, represents Mann's ultimate fulfillment as an artist, something he had been working toward ever since the day in 1910 when, left uncharacteristically speechless after the premiere of Mahler's Eighth Symphony conducted by the composer himself, he penned a letter of admiration in which he thanked Mahler for expressing the highest ideals of the age in the form best suited to it. In Dr. Faustus, Mann has accomplished something equally astounding, but using literature instead of music. As such it represents his crowning achievement (and his other books such as Joseph and His Brothers, Magic Mountain, and Buddenbrooks, to name only the best known, are masterpieces too -- I consider Mann to be the greatest writer who ever lived).In her preface Lowe-Porter likens the book to a cathedral. And indeed it is a complex and magnificent structure in which ideas replace stained glass windows, architectural details, soaring arches and echoing spaces, each doing its part to create the whole. The true characters in the book are actually the ideas; the protagonists are identified with the ideas they represent and act on their behalf. The narrator Zeitblom is a humanist; the composer Leverku"hn, who has made a pact with the Devil, lies at the intersection of the humane and the demonic. Although primarily interested in ideas, Mann gives rich and probing characterizations of half-a-dozen characters in the book, and he knows how to add telling ironic and human touches. As if that were not enough, with true virtuosity he also interweaves the horrific fate of Germany with that of Leverku"hn, and by drawing on the historical antecedents of both humanism and demonism in Germany (and indeed in all of Western culture) he manages to make the reader almost sympathetic to Germany's and Leverkuhn's plight. But it would be a mistake to focus on the demonic in the book at the expense of the other strands in the tapestry that Mann weaves. In order to enjoy this book you MUST be interested in the ideas. They form the basis of Western civilization and were very highly developed in Mann's time, when true giants were in the world. Cultural standards have declined since, but the same ideas are still relevant to our lesser age. Ranging as it does over the whole of civilized thought and culture, Mann's acute artistic intelligence might seem a bit dry and abstract at first, and some readers find the first sixty pages or so to be slow going (but they improve on rereading, because you will understand why they are there). There is also much dialog on cultural themes (e.g., at the Kridwis gatherings) which helps to set the intellectual background of the times. Some of it is so scholarly and even arcane that the chances that anyone could ever actually say such things seem impossibly remote; one is reminded of the comically precise speech of certain characters in Jane Austen. But there is a great deal of substance in this intellectual give-and-take and I think it is one of the high points of the book. So by all means read this splendid masterpiece, which leaves everything else far behind and below it.
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