Description
Thomas Mann wrote his last great novel, Doctor Faustus, during his exile from Nazi Germany. Although he already had a long string of masterpieces to his name, in retrospect this seems to be the novel he was born to write.
A modern reworking of the Faust legend in which a twentieth-century composer sells his soul to the devil for the artistic power he craves, the story brilliantly interweaves music, philosophy, theology, and politics. Adrian Leverkühn is a talented young composer who is willing to go to any lengths to reach greater heights of achievement. What he gets is twenty-four years of genius—years of increasingly extraordinary musical innovation intertwined with progressive and destructive madness.
A scathing allegory of Germany’s renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism, Doctor Faustus is also a profound meditation on artistic genius. Obsessively exploring the evil into which his country had fallen, Mann succeeds as only he could have in charting the dimensions of that evil; his novel has both the pertinence of history and the universality of myth.
Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter.
Book Details
Format: |
Hardcover |
Number of Pages: |
580 |
ISBN: |
9781857150803 |
Published: |
4 Jun 1992 |
Weight: |
594g |
Dimensions: |
230 x 211 x 35 (mm) |
Language: |
English |