In defence of Thomas Mann

[BlogSpy]

A couple of blogs I read have recently been fairly damning of Thomas Mann's great novel, Doktor Faustus. Here's Scott at Conversational Reading on the novel, and then a follow-up from Shane on eNotes. They're right to say that Mann is difficult, especially if you're reading the old H.T. Lowe-Porter translations. If you are, ditch them immediately and seek out the excellent modern renderings by John E. Woods, which are often available in the UK in the Everyman's Library, and sometimes in U.S. Vintage imports. The latter is available from Amazon here. This isn't the place to go into the disastrous early translations of Mann's work. If you're interested, try the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann; there's an entire essay on the subject there.
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Thomas Mann: requires discipline
Even armed with a good translation or, if you're lucky enough to be able to read German, the original, you still need plenty of discipline to complete a Mann novel. Milan Kundera, in an essay on Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra, describes Mann as 'setting up a watchtower' from which to view the history of Europe in the pre-war years. But the watchtower does not allow Mann to look into the future with any accuracy. (An irony: Kundera has been accused of exactly the same failing since the Velvet Revolution.)
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