The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years - Thomas Mann (Transl. Denver Lindley) (1954)

For the past few years I looked forward to the day when I could return to my work here and review the last novel by Thomas Mann that I was truly excited to experience.  Of course, Royal Highness, The Holy Sinner, and The Black Swan remain out there--to say nothing of Joseph and his Brothers--but I believed that The Confessions of Felix Krull was the last work I had yet to read that could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the previous classics that had been reviewed on this blog.

Oeuvre Rule: the first-ever review on Flying Houses was Doctor Faustus; Buddenbrooks was reviewed twice (owing to a faulty internet connection and my mistaken belief that phrases from drafts would be intriguing to readers); The Magic Mountain contains no shortage of brilliance; and Death in Venice is every bit as troubling and beautiful as when it was published 101 years ago. Where then, to rank Felix Krull?

[The bottom?] (!)

Of course, Felix Krull is not a bad book.  But it is an unfinished one.  Unfortunately it suffers from the same problem as Fitzgerald's would-be late-era masterpiece The Love of the Last Tycoon--the untimely passing of its author.  Of course Mann lived a much longer life than Fitzgerald.  He died at age 80 rather than 44.  But it is a dangerous thing to begin a novel near the end of one's life when one bears the risk of disappointing the scores of readers that one has worked so hard to cultivate.  And while there are certainly flashes of genius that make the above-mentioned works such absolute pleasures, Felix Krull ultimately is not on their level.  I will submit, however, that had Mann finished this novel (if it were not only "The Early Years"), it would probably be closer to being in that exalted category of "classic."  As such we must mourn for what could have been--like Fitzgerald but in a different guise--and wonder whether some younger writer may "take up" Felix's story and attempt to finish it in a way that Mann would have found pleasing.  That would be no easy task.

Perhaps it is best to read Felix Krull after reading "Felix Krull," the short story from which it was derived.  I have not done that, however, and I can only say that if you happen upon a collection of Mann's stories that you check this one out before moving onto the book.  The book is 375 pages long.  It would probably be about 800 pages long in its proper finished form.

It opens up, as it must in a first-person narrative bearing such a title, with Felix's early childhood.  He grows up in an unnamed town along the Rhine Valley, near Mainz.  His father is a purveyor of champagne.  He has one sister (Olympia) and a godfather (Schimmelpreester) that opens up certain doors for him.  His parents like to have parties.  They often have people over, and apparently for this reason his family is held in low repute in their town.  Or not quite:

"It was mostly these social affairs that provoked the town gossip that called our household disreputable, but I learned early that it was the economic aspect of the situation that was principally in question.  For it was rumoured (and with only too much justification) that my poor father's business was in desperate straits, and that the expensive fireworks and dinners would inevitably furnish the coup de grâce." (15)

There are several fantastic scenes early on in this book that made me feel it was on its way to
greatness.  And truly, the first "book" in it (there are three: Book I is about 50 pages, Book II is about 130 pages, and Book III is about 200 pages) may be close to perfect.  Near the end of Book I, his father suffers an unfortunate end (and if I were Elizabeth Warren, I would include this passage in a casebook to complement a certain passage from A Man in Full):

"Our financial collapse was complete; it became clear why my poor father had put it off so long and involved himself so deeply in the toils of the usurers, for he was aware that when the crash came, it would reduce him to total beggary.  Everything went under the hammer: the warehouses (but who wanted to buy so notoriously bad a product as my father's wine?), the real estate--that is, the cellars and our villa, encumbered as they were with mortgages to two-thirds of their value, mortgages on which the interest had not been paid in years--the dwarfs, the toadstools and earthenware animals in the garden--yes, even the mirrored ball and the aeolian harp went the same sad way.  The inside of the house was stripped of every pleasant luxury: the spinning-wheel, the downy cushions, the glass boxes and smelling salts all went at public auction; not even the halberds over the windows or the portieres were spared; and if the little device over the entrance door that played the Strauss melody as the door closed still jingled unmindful of its desolation, it was only because it had not been noticed by its legal owners." (51)

Felix then moves with his mother to Frankfurt, where the charming second part of the novel takes place.  Schimmelpreester tells each member of the family what they are supposed to do, and they follow his orders.  Felix is supposed to go to Paris to meet with a hotelier, but he also must worry about his military service.  In the meantime, he enjoys his time in Frankfurt, though he is reduced to sleeping on a kitchen bench, and often tries to summon carriages for people leaving the theater, sometimes receiving a tip.

Now, Book One is very good, but it takes 80 pages to get to Chapter V of Book II, which is probably the first "great" scene in the novel: Felix's first attempt at "conning."  He hopes to avoid military service, and his manner of completing this task is unlikely.  He expresses great enthusiasm and tells all of the presiding officers that he considers himself in excellent shape for service.  They find this rather hard to believe, as he makes subtle movements that betray a weaker constitution.  They tell him that the barracks is not a health resort, and laugh at him when he asks if he could just try because he might improve.

After this, we come to Felix's encounter with a prostitute named Rozsa.  While there is a scene in Book One that briefly details an affair he carries on with a housemaid who is perhaps fifteen years older than him, the scene with Rozsa is more remarkable because she seems to love him regardless of the fact that he has no money.  At this point it may be prudent to mention a criticism that I have read of this book: the main character is unsympathetic.  He is extremely good looking and he charms everyone he meets within a few minutes and everything comes much too easy for him.  Well, I hope my review indicates otherwise.  I do not share this criticism with others.  I think there are plenty of signs that most of the other characters find Felix annoying, and it is only through these "love scenes" that certain readers may scoff in disbelief.  However, the scene with Rozsa is practically rated PG compared to what comes later.  Felix also gives a nice defense of his relationship with her, and why he should not be considered a pimp despite the fact that sometimes he shares in what she gets from her customers:

"For my own part I am in agreement with folk wisdom which holds that when two persons do the same thing it is no longer the same; yes, I go further and maintain that labels such as 'drunkard,' gambler,' or even 'wastrel' not only do not embrace and define the actual living case, but in some instances do not even touch it.  This is my point of view; others may judge differently about this confidence--in respect to which it should be remembered that I am making it of my own free will and could quite easily have passed over it in silence." (112)

Finally, then, in Chapter VII of Book II, about 115 pages in, the "action" of the novel seems to pick up, for Felix is taken out of his home element and put on a train destined for Paris.  He has a number of adventures on the train, but he is primarily entertained by acting extremely politely with the commissaire, even going so far as to wish his wife and children well after he takes his ticket.  The language of the book switches, in stretches that are nearly too long to subsist in untranslated form, to French.  I would not be surprised if newer editions of the book translated the French into English, or at least provided footnotes  I could understand most of what was being said, but I think I have a decent "foundation" in French.  Regardless, even if you do not know French, I do not think you will miss all that much if your edition does not translate it.  Also of note during this section is an unlikely event: a woman "dropping" certain valuable jewelry into Felix's bag during a customs check--his second act of "conning."

Felix finds his way to the hotel where he is supposed to work, and to the dormitory where he is to sleep, along with his bunkmate, Stanko.  Stanko finds the jewelry and tells him to go to a certain shopkeeper to trade it in for cash.  Felix does so the next day after speaking to Stürzli, the general director of the Hotel Saint James and Albany, after being told that he will take over for Armand, the elevator operator who is quitting that day.  The scene with the shopkeeper Pierre Jean-Pierre is as memorable as the military service coup, particularly in the way the negotiations are carried on rather disagreeably until the deal is struck, at which point Jean-Pierre turns into a much nicer person.

The last scene worth noting in Book Two is the experience Felix (now Armand--and it is strange the way everyone calls him Armand, not even thinking he has a different name) has with a certain middle-aged woman--the same one that dropped her jewelry into his bag on the train.  She is a novelist who is staying in the hotel, and she takes Felix into her room where she asks him to defile her.  Now this may very well be the most unrealistic scene in the book.  Perhaps it is pure fantasy, or perhaps it is Mann trying to write a "modern 1954 novel" complete with blunt intimations:

"'Perversion!  Love is perversion through and through, it can't be anything else.  Probe it where you will, you will find perversion...But it's admittedly sad and painful for a woman to be able to love a man only when he is quite, quite young, when he is a boy.  C'est un amour tragique, inadmissible, not practical, not for life, not for marriage.  I, I married Houpflé, a rich businessman, so that in the shelter of his riches I could write my books, qui sont énormément intelligents.  My husband can do nothing, as I told you, at least with me.  Il me trompe, as they say, with a theatrical demoiselle.  Perhaps he is some good with her--I should rather doubt it.  It's a matter of indifference to me--this whole world of men and women and marriage and betrayal is a matter of indifference.  I live in my so-called perversion, in the love of my life that lies at the bottom of everything I am, in the happiness and misery of this enthusiasm with its heavy curse that nothing, nothing in the whole visible world equals the enchantment of the youthful male.  I live in my love for all of you, you, you the image of desire, whose beauty I kiss in complete abnegation of spirit.  I kiss your presumptuous lips over the white teeth you show when you smile.  I kiss the tender stars of your breast, the little golden hairs on the dark skin of your armpits.  And how does that happen?  With your blue eyes and blond hair, where do you get this coloring, this tint of light bronze?'"  (172-173)

That final question is a reference to Felix's physical appearance--at once both "light" and "dark."  This scene with Madame Houpflé is somewhat difficult to square with the rest of the novel.  It is certainly unrealistic, but perhaps not so much given that Felix is extremely good-looking (one may wonder about what unlikely events befall those blessed with such looks).  At least it is entertaining and humorous when she asks Felix to beat her and when he confesses that he took her jewelry and that she finds it charming and asks him to steal more from her while she pretends she is asleep.  But there is also question mark #1 that I have about this book:

"She came.  We came.  I had given my best, had in my enjoyment made proper recompense.  But how could I fail to be annoyed that at the very climax she had been stammering about degradation and had called me a stupid little slave?" (170)

Does he mean what I think he means?  It is impossible to think otherwise.  Perhaps question mark #1 is not such a puzzle, but question mark #2, I must admit, is a doozy....

But before we get there there is almost 200 pages of action.  I will cover it shortly.  "Armand" is serviceable as a "lift-man" but soon he moves on to work as a waiter in the hotel.  In the meantime he sells more of the jewelry that he "stole" from his ladyfriend, and he and his colleague Stanko enjoy an evening at the circus.  As a waiter he meets a fair number of interesting characters, but three in particular: Eleanor Twentyman, Lord Strathbogie and the Marquis de Venosta.  

In keeping with a theme of the novel, Twentyman and Strathbogie become entranced by "Armand."  This happens at the same time, roughly.  I would go so far as to say that this little section, from pages 200-217, is the single best part of the entire book.  It is contained like a perfect short story.  Felix needs to tell both that, charmed as he is by their infatuation with him, he cannot do what is asked of him.

Eleanor is 17 or 18, staying at the hotel with her parents. It is humorous to see her fall in love with a waiter, who must be kind and gracious all the while.  She comes down to breakfast by herself when her parents are still asleep and tries to "woo" "Armand" until he is eventually made to deflate her advances:

"'It's abnormal, too, for you not to ignore me, as would be natural and as your Mummy quite properly demands, but instead to come down secretly to breakfast and talk to me about "love" while your parents are prevented by their peaceful slumbers from coming to the defence of the social order.  This "love" of yours is a forbidden love which I cannot approve, and I am forced to reject any pleasure of my own in the fact that you like to see me.  It's all right for me to like to see you, if I keep it to myself, that's quite true.  But for you, Mr. and Mrs. Twentyman's daughter, to like to see me, that's impossible, that's contrary to nature...What you call "love" is something that happens to people on trips and at the sight of tail-coats like mine.  When you have left, as you will very soon, you'll forget it before you get to the next station.'" (205)

This mention of love being something that happens to people on trips may perhaps remind the reader of Death in Venice, and I can only say that the description of what happens with Lord Strathbogie is the ultimate "reverse Death in Venice" and that Mann must have intended it as such.  "Armand's" conversations with the Lord seem to have greater weight, as the man, who is about 50, desires to take him away and make him his personal valet, and maybe even adopt him and make him his heir.  Felix, as a person who is destined to wear many masks throughout life, finds this idea somewhat appealing, but ultimately cannot accept:

"'Please--I don't want to wound you or minimize the honour you have paid me, but if someone precisely like me occurs only once--each of us, of course, occurs only once--there are nevertheless millions of young men of my age and general physique, and except for the tiny bit of uniqueness, one is made very much like the other.  I knew a woman who declared that she was interested in the whole genre without exception--it must be essentially that way with you, too.  The genre is present always and everywhere.'" (216) 

Finally, after the novel reaches its high point (in my opinion), Felix meets the Marquis de Venosta, who is about his age, and whom he finds to be a pleasant person to serve.  The Marquis is from Luxembourg, and he has been staying in Paris and seeing a woman named Zaza.  His parents do not approve of this relationship and they believe that a world tour will do him some good and take his mind off of Zaza.  

On his nights off from the hotel, "Armand" sometimes goes to the theater or has dinner at nice restaurants, and on one of these evenings he runs into the Marquis, who is very garrulous and drinks very much wine and causes "Armand" to miss the theatrical performance that night.  During this dinner scene, it begins to become obvious why the Marquis has become such a major character.  Of course, Felix is plotting his next "con," which will be impersonating the Marquis on this world tour while the real Marquis stays behind in Paris and rents out an apartment with Zaza.  His first stop will be in Lisbon, Portugal.  

And it is here that the novel ends.  This is the longest single portion of the book, and perhaps a bit tiresome.  However, on the train ride to Lisbon, Felix (now "Louis" or "Loulou") meets one Professor Kuckuck, a man with "starry eyes."  The Professor speaks of celestial subject matter and this proves enchanting for "Loulou":

"There was no question, he said, that life on earth was not only an ephemeral episode, but Being itself was also--an interlude between Nothingness and Nothingness.  Being had not always existed and would not always exist.  It had had a beginning and would have an end, and with it space and time; for they existed only through Being and through it were bound to each other.  Space, he said, was nothing but the order of material things and their relationship to one another.  Without things to occupy it, there would be no space and no time either, for time was only the ordering of events made possible by the presence of objects; it was the product of motion, of cause and effect, whose sequence gave time its direction and without which there would be no time.  Absence of time and space, however, was the definition of Nothingness.  This was extensionless in every sense, a changeless eternity, which had only been temporarily interrupted by spatio-temporal Being.  A greater duration, by aeons, had been vouchsafed to Being than to Life; but some time of a certainty it would end, and with equal certainty the end implied a beginning..." (266)

This conversation goes on for about ten pages and is probably the highlight of the "Lisbon" section of the novel.  This is a strange moment in the novel and I can only conjecture that Mann wrote this knowing that he would not complete the rest of the novel, and that he was not very far from meeting Being and Nothingness himself.  As such it is a powerful moment, and probably the most profound single piece of the novel.  

Once "Loulou" settles in town, he goes the Museum of Natural History, where Professor Kuckuck is a director.  Then he meets the Professor's family, which includes a wife and a daughter.  The daughter is named Zouzou, and the irony of "Loulou" meeting his very own Zaza is not lost on the character.  There is also a strange section where "Loulou" meets the King of Portugal and tells raucous stories about his parents' two dogs, and this is all conveyed in a long letter "Loulou" writes to the Marquis de Venosta's actual parents.  

His stay in Portugal is longer than intended by a month, and perhaps predictably, he falls in love with Zouzou, while playing tennis with her often.  Zouzou is a fairly interesting character--she is very "forthright" and believes that "silence is unhealthy" and that "things must be called by their real names."  She is very cynical, in a word, and she does not believe in "love"--she believes that love (in keeping with another theme of the novel) is but a pretext for sexual longing, and this makes it a perversion in a certain sense.  "Loulou" tries very hard to persuade her otherwise in a long speech near the very end.

However, before we get to question mark #2, I must add finally that at a certain point, I became upset that this novel was not going to provide closure.  I was distracted from this final set of events, and did not really care how things turned out.  In fact, if it has not been made clear above, I consider this the weakest section of the novel.  The "Paris" section is certainly the strongest, and this part might only have been better if we saw what became of "Loulou" in Argentina, or the United States--other stops that he was to make on his world tour.  Also we never see Felix go to jail, as he mentions in passing at earlier points in the novel. 

Nor do we find out how the matador that he sees during a bullfight in the penultimate scene of the novel comes back into the story.  All we see is that he gives Zouzou a stack of pictures that he had made--nude sketches of Zaza with Zouzou's curls--and how she is disgusted by them, but how she then kisses him passionately--and then we finally get to question mark #2.

Zouzou's mother sees what happens, and she reproaches "Loulou":

"'You can thus realize what stupidity you were guilty of when, in your need for love, you followed a childish course and formed the capricious notion of turning a child's head.  That was not choosing or acting like a man, but like an infant.  Mature reason had to intervene before it was too late.'" (377)

But then, finally, question mark #2--does she fall under his spell, too?

"'Once when we were conversing you spoke to me about the graciousness of maturity and the graciousness with which it speaks of youth.  To encounter it successfully requires, of course, a man's courage.  If an agreeable youth only showed a man's courage instead of seeking satisfaction in childishness, he would not have to run off like a drenched poodle, uncomforted, into the wide world....'
'Maria!' I cried.

And: Holé! Heho! Ahé' she exclaimed in majestic jubilation.  A whirlwind of primordial forces seized and bore me into the realm of ecstasy.  And high and stormy, under my ardent caresses, stormier than at the Iberian game of blood, I saw the surging of that queenly bosom." (377-378)

Perhaps that is not quite a puzzle either, but it is a very strange way to end this novel.  I have said all I can about The Confessions of Felix Krull.  I recommend it for Mann-obsessives, but there are finer "closure-producing" compositions in his oeuvre if one has not exhausted it.  

    

   

Blindness - Jose Saramago; Blindness - Dir. Fernando Meirelles; Contagion - Dir. Steven Soderbergh

This review is primarily about Blindness, the novel, but I watched the film adaptation as my final Netflick before it became known as a Qwikflick (and sadly cannot afford this new service--though I admit it is dumb, as much business sense as it makes--another perfect example of the world going to hell), and then the night after went to see Contagion in the movie theater. Because of the close proximity of experiencing all three, and because of the similarities between them, this will be the first ever triple-review on Flying Houses.

Blindness provided me with two personal epiphanies--two philosophical insights, slight as they may be, unworthy of a full essay devoted to exploring them, but appropriate here: #1 relates to imagination and ideation. It can be explained by this simple illustration. Let us suppose I am reading a book. Let us suppose it takes place at a time not in the distant past nor the distant future (in other words, anytime between the 19th and 21st centuries). Let us suppose one of the primary settings in this book is a farm. I know one farm in my life better than any other. It was my grandmother's house, the farm my mother grew up on, which we would visit every single Sunday of my childhood, a one hour drive from our house. If there is ever a farm in a book I read, absent some incredibly long and detailed description, I will automatically associate the farm imagined by the writer with the farm I recall in my mind. This could have been an interesting discussion in the class I took called "Borders of the Western Imagination." Our imagination stretches only so far as our experience. Thus the writer forges a connection with the reader through an abstract measure--a single word, a noun. It is impossible for us to imagine the same object in our minds (unless it is a familiar object that everyone can recall, like an Egyptian pyramid), and this is where my literary epiphany comes in. It has always been clear to me that long, descriptive writing is boring, and that I will slog through it thinking, what a waste of my time, anyone can describe what a house looks like from the outside, but who can describe what it feels like to live in that house. Houses are different from farms. They are a far more common object, you can imagine hundreds of different variations, whereas I have not been to many farms, and primarily remember one. Ultimately, description makes little difference. We are all human, and we all have our imaginations to supplement the words that the writer provides. The story is what matters, the dialogue is what matters, and the reader's ability to identify with the characters and their actions is what matters. Blindness is perhaps the ultimate illustration of this concept.

Oeuvre rule: I have not read anything else by Saramago, but apparently all of his books contain the same style of dialogue, which is like this, I'm not going to use any quotations, Why would you do that, Because I am original, because I don't care what rules I'm supposed to follow, Don't you think people will get confused and stop reading, I don't care if they stop reading, they won't because as I said in my previous post, dialogue is like candy for the reader, and even if we include a two-page-long paragraph dialogue between two characters where you begin to lose track of who is who, readers will go to the end because each dialogue is almost like something you'd find in Plato.

That's a tall compliment, but Blindness has the unmistakable flavor of a myth or a parable, and while published in 1996, it can sit alongside Apology or Phaedo or The Oedipus Cycle as well as any other book released over the past century. For one, it is relatively short. It is not an all-consuming, deeply-nuanced study of a family in decline, but the presentation of a philosophical situation, and a reasonable prediction of all the events that could follow.

Here is the plot, shorn of spoilers (and indeed, if you read the back of the paperback copy, it provides spoilers up until the final third of the book--this is a book that won't really be spoiled, except for a few key events--indeed if you watch the movie and look at its R-rating, the description of why it is Rated-R, that is an even bigger spoiler): a man is in his car. He is waiting for the light to turn green. It does, but he goes blind, and he starts freaking out. Another man comes up to his car and asks if he can help him. He walks him back to his home, which happens to be nearby. The first blind man tells his wife, and they go to see the ophthalmologist (I will just use "doctor" from now on because it's hard to spell ophthalmologist). At his office is a girl with dark glasses (a lady of the night, pun intended), a boy with a squint, and an old man with an eyepatch. Later, the scene shoots back to the man who helped the first blind man. He has gone back to the car, and he steals it. He is actually a thief. However, before he can enjoy his new prize, he goes blind. The scene shoots back to the doctor's office. Doctor sees the first blind man and says, I don't know what's wrong with you, there's no medical explanation for this sort of thing. Later that night he goes home and sees his wife and tells her about this unusual case of blindness. He goes to study from his books, and he goes blind.

Soon, the Government begins to notice that people are going blind, and they set up quarantine facilities. Our basic group of characters are all placed in the same mental hospital. They are given food rations, but little direction from the military personnel guarding the facility, because they too are afraid of contracting the "white sickness," called such because the person does not see "blackness" but rather a "sea of milky white." The scenes in the mental hospital comprise the second act of the book. Several key episodes occur, but I will not discuss what happens. Let us just say that the primary allegorical element of the novel is introduced--that is, when civilization and society cease to exist, de facto representatives and leaders emerge in some form or another, either by tyranny or some democratic agreement. What happens to the mental hospital is disgusting. Saramago devotes a good deal of description to the filth.

The third part of the book is probably the strongest section. The last twenty or thirty pages are quite good, too. However, I borrowed this book on a recommendation from a girl who graduated from Fordham Law School. We were talking about Hemingway (as my previous post indicated, back in June 2011, I would soon finish that endless behemoth of a biography on him) and how the ending to The Sun Also Rises is just one of the most beautiful things ever, and how The Old Man and the Sea was a book that you could read anytime, in one day if you had the time, that could just sort of refresh your conscience and remind you of what it is to live and to be alive. She spoke beautifully about literature, and so when I saw Blindness on her shelf and remarked that I had heard great things, and when she said that the ending, also, was worth the total experience, I was convinced. Now, the ending is something of a "twist," and the last section of this book is certainly, to my mind, the strongest part, and the final paragraph can be both mesmerizing and confusing, but still, to a certain extent, I was underwhelmed. That said, I think Blindness is worth reading.

It is something of a long literary experiment, in the vein of Italo Calvino or Haruki Murukami. (I always say those two are experimental because I have only read "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World"--the latter of which is the only book I have read since April of 2008 that is not reviewed on Flying Houses, probably because I just don't know how I feel about it). The characters do not have proper names. The book is dialogue-heavy, but I don't believe there is a single quotation mark in it. The characters are blind and they struggle to complete the most mundane tasks. And there are not many portions that I find easy to quote:

"We came out of internment only three days ago, Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it Hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible, Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them, I'd like you to tell me how you lived during quarantine, Why, I am a writer, You would have to have been there, A writer is just like anyone else, he cannot know everything, nor can he experience everything, he must ask and imagine, One day I may tell you what it was like, then you can write a book, Yes, I am writing it, How, if you are blind, The blind too can write, You mean that you had time to learn the braille alphabet, I do not know know braille, How can you write, then, asked the first blind man, Let me show you." (292, quotations mine)

Here, Saramago seems to be inserting himself as a character. The "writer" becomes an archetypal figure, as do the other characters, but this time as an even more transparent philosophical mouthpiece. And while the pleasures the book contains primarily relate to larger issues of the comprehensibility of the different facets of human existence, there are a couple traditional "novelistic" episodes that may bring tears:

"Men are all the same, they think because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women, I know very little about women, and about you I know nothing, as for men, in my opinion, by modern criteria I am now an old man and one-eyed as well as being blind, Have you nothing else to say against yourself, A lot more, you can't imagine how the list of self-recriminations grows with advancing age, I am young and have my fair share already, You haven't done anything really bad yet, How do you know, if you've never lived with me, You're right, I have never lived with you, Why do you repeat my words in that tone of voice, What tone of voice, That one, All I said was that I have never lived with you, Come on, come on, don't pretend that you don't understand, Don't insist, I beg you, I do insist, I want to know, Let's return to hopes, All right, The other example of hope which I refused to give was this, What, The last self-accusation on my list, Please, explain yourself, I never understand riddles, The monstrous wish of never regaining our sight, Why, So that we can go on living as we are, Do you mean all together, or just you and me, Don't make me answer, If you were only a man you could avoid answering, like all others, but you yourself said that you are an old man, and old men, if longevity has any sense at all, should not avert their face from the truth, answer me, With you, And why do you want to live with me, Do you want me to tell in front of everybody, We have done the dirtiest, ugliest, most repulsive things together, what you can tell me cannot possibly be worse, All right, if you insist, let it be, because the man I still am loves the woman you are, Was it so very difficult to make a declaration of love, At my age, people fear ridicule, You were not ridiculous, Let's forget it, please, I have no intention of forgetting it or letting you forget it either, It's nonsense, you forced it out of me and now, And now it's my turn, Don't say anything you may regret later, remember the black list, If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow, Please stop, You want to live with me and I want to live with you, You are mad, We'll start living together here, like a couple, and we shall continue living together if we have to separate from our friends, two blind people must be able to see more than one, It's madness, you don't love me, What's this about loving, I never loved anyone, I just went to bed with men. So you agree with me then, Not really, You spoke of sincerity, tell me then if it's true that you really love me, I love you enough to want to be with you, and that is the first time I've ever said that to anyone, You would not have said it to me either if you had met me somewhere before, an elderly man, half bald with white hair, with a patch over one eye and a cataract in the other, The woman I was then wouldn't have said it, I agree, the person who said it was the woman I am today, Let's see then what the woman you will be tomorrow will have to say, Are you testing me, What an idea, who am I to put you to the test, it's life that decides these things, It's already made one decision." (306-307, quotations mine)

So, let's just take a moment here to point out that, yes, Blindness, is worth reading, and Saramago may have justifiably won the Nobel prize--and indeed, reading it in its original language (which translates directly to Essay on Blindness) might shed even more light on how great a triumph of clarity it is. But seriously--writing a book like this is much easier than writing a book like Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain. Those take years, and maybe we have to be much more fast-paced in 1995 than we do in 1915, but if you look at the total oeuvre, Mann's probably outweighs Saramago's by 100%. This in terms of page numbers. And it may be interesting to compare how much money each made from his books (this information in the publishing industry in general seems to be kept secret, and should be addressed more directly so people don't throw away years of their lives writing books no one will ever read), or how much time they spent writing their specific novels, compared to whatever "side-projects" they did for money. But they do have one thing in common: their depiction of reality, and of people acting as they really act, rings true. This is another literary epiphany that I have emphasized greatly over the last several years: REALISM IS ALL THAT MATTERS.

Before we enter into film, philosphical epiphany #2 came to me at some point during my high school years. I had a roommate my sophomore year. High school, is, I think, a cliquey time (law school is too but save that discussion for later). People band together in their own little groups. And it caused me to reflect, how, as the group of participants grows, so also does the group you as an individual are willing to ally yourself with. This is the simple illustration: you are in your dorm room with your roommate, and you are having an argument, or playing a computer game against one another on a local-area-network (Command and Conquer, for example). You hate each other. You want to kill the other person. You want to beat the hell out of them. The next day, you and your roommate play on a team, against two other roommates who live down the hall. Now you are friends and you have to work together, and the other roommates are your enemy. The next day, your dorm has organized a basketball tournament, and every floor has to form their own team to play against the others. The day after that, your dorm has to play in a tournament against every other dorm. The day after that, your school has to play against another school in a big football game. The day after that, an All-American team is selected from the group of 15 schools of which your school is a part. The day after that, All-Americans are chosen from every high school in the country. And so on, until Earth is itself the ultimate community, but it does not seem likely that there will be intergalactic warfare anytime soon. The point is this: we are all part of communities, as tiny as an apartment and as huge as the planet. Our concerns shift and we are more likely to be agreeable the larger the community that we function within, because there will be many other people on your same side that will denounce you, or question your beliefs, not out of some personal animus, but out of the altruistic motive of discovering what is best for one and what is best for all. That is, there is a search for reason, not some kind of search for dominance over the other side. This is the basic problem with the adversarial system of law, personal relationships, a free enterprise society, everything.

After that incomprehensible thought pattern, let's move on to Fernando Meirelles. First of all, if you have not seen City of God, please watch it next weekend. I only saw it once, like 5 years ago, but it stands out to me as one of the best films of the decade of the 2000s. Second, I thought The Constant Gardener was real boring. Sorry, but I don't remember anything about it. Finally, Blindness is ultimately a poor adaptation of the book, but its heart is in the right place. This is meant to be an absolutely faithful adaptation. And it is. No characters are named--except "The King of the Ward 3" who is played by Gael Garcia Bernal. Now, he is one of my favorite actors--I really liked Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Science of Sleep and those movies show that he has kind of an incredible energy. His character is definitely in the book, but he is also given an auxiliary role so that his character could also be named "the bartender," which is not in the book. Also, Sandra Oh plays the "Minister of Health" which is not in the book, really, or if she is, in disembodied form. Either of these actors would have been good to play one of the major characters, but to me they are basically wasted in the roles they are given. Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo do fine with the material they are given, but everyone else seems rushed to develop their character, or they just come through less clearly than in the book. Many key moments are transported directly from the text of the book (like when the Doctor asks for a show of hands when voting on something, and then realizes the absurdity of such a directive), but many are left out (like the second long quotation from above). The book's third act in particular seems cut down sharply. There are several key scenes there that would have made the movie much better.

Basically, there are several problems with the film. #1: Blindness is meant to be read, not viewed. It all has to do with the comprehension of our senses. Reading is, in a sense, a blind activity. We are not looking at objects--we are looking at words and imagining objects. When you watch a movie, you are looking at the objects. The director and cinematographer make an effort to portray the "white sickness" through combinations of visual trickery, but it feels like an empty exercise. #2: Blindness the book is much funnier. The book is hilarious, whether or not always intentional, and the movie is pretty serious all the way through--excepting the one joke about raising hands. #3: The movie is marketed as a "thriller." And it is made like that, with an emphasis on plot--what's going to happen to these people? A more dreamlike, detached, philosophical approach might have made for a better adaptation. It appears as if the producers were shooting for the moon--they wanted a big-budget blockbuster with an uber-art house director adapted from a Nobel-prize winning author that millions of people all over the world would see. But Harry Potter Blindness is not. That said, I still believe that an adaptation of White Noise would be a huge success. BUT IT HAS TO BE DONE RIGHT!

Of special note in Blindness is the final shot. It gave me a different interpretation than what I had of the text, and upon re-reading, it is the correct one.

If one was reading Blindness in September 2011, one could not help but think of its similarities to Contagion when the posters started showing up in New York. Here is a movie that everybody knows. It is the follow-up to Outbreak in a sense, fifteen years later, with a bit more sophisticated technology, and a slightly amped-up cast. Many elements from Blindness and Contagion coalesce. In particular, the quarantines that are implemented. However, the key difference is that society does not crumble in Contagion quite the way it does in Blindness. It's less philosophical and more realistic, though plenty of readers will admit that what happens in Blindness is totally plausible--if such a "white sickness" were to actually happen. Contagion is very scary. The first thirty minutes scared me. I really liked it for a while towards the middle. Then towards the end, (I won't spoil anything, though it seems this film is incredibly popular, and has already made more money and attracted a bigger audience than either Blindness ever will) I started to get bored.

But yeah, a depiction of a disease that is visceral rather than invisible will generally be more engaging on film. The converse will generally be more engaging on page.

Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse

Oeuvre rule: I have only read one other book by Hesse--Siddhartha--and that was a masterpiece. It was assigned to me my freshman year in college, and it was one of those moments that is able to make one very pleased with the trajectory of their education. The book carries great wisdom and much profundity. It is about one person's journey towards spiritual enlightenment. And so is Steppenwolf. They were published only a few years apart, and one cannot help but wondering what tumult in Hesse's life may have contributed towards the theme in these novels: Siddhartha posits that the most natural path towards enlightenment is asceticism, whereas Steppenwolf--published later--seems to indicate that enlightenment can come courtesy of magic theaters, drugs, sex with loose women, and conversations with Mozart.

I have to be honest and say that I enjoyed Siddhartha more. Perhaps if Steppenwolf were assigned to me it would have been more enjoyable. But it is certainly more "adult" than that previous volume, and as Hesse indicates in his foreword to a later edition, easily misinterpreted by youth that enjoy the more rebellious aspects of its protagonist:

"Of course, I neither can nor intend to tell my readers how they ought to understand my tale. May everyone find in it what strikes a chord in him and is of some use to him! But I would be happy if many of them were to realize that the story of the Steppenwolf pictures a disease and crisis--but not one leading to death and destruction, on the contrary: to healing." (vi)

What is the story about? Harry Haller, who is about fifty years old, who has been married and lived a past life that allowed him to save up income, but who is now alone, seeking a room for rent in an undisclosed city. The entire mood of the novel is quite postmodern, and many of the surreal landscapes may be reflected in more contemporary novelists like Italo Calvino and Haruki Murakami. For being written around the same time as The Great Gatsby, Steppenwolf seems remarkably futuristic, modern, and especially prophetic--perhaps most clearly witnessed in a short scene discussing wireless technology.

Harry is a very depressed person who longs to kill himself right around age fifty. But more to the point--his personality is split in two sides: the wolf and the man. For the first hundred pages of this novel, the duality of the soul is often discussed. Harry goes out to a bar, and then passes by a mysterious entryway to a Magic Theater "for madmen only." Later he finds a vendor in the area, who gives him a pamphlet--"The Treatise on the Steppenwolf."

This novel is broken up into only a few parts:
-the preface (written by another housemate of Harry's, as introduction to Harry's records)
-the opening of Harry's records
-The Treatise on the Steppenwolf
-the encounter of Hermine, and the new way of life
-The Masked Ball/Magic Theater episode

It is not broken up into particularly digestible chapters, and though the book is scarcely more than 200 pages, there are often long, dense passages that make the book seem longer than 300 pages. Some of the material on the division of personalities in the Steppenwolf is quite excellent and thought-provoking:

"We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rich and complex organism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary and primitive. Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications--and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hear's the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of the cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold beings dawns upon men of unusual powers and they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words, why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident, when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares this delusion." (58-59)

But you can see within this passage alone one of my few complaints about the book: it tends to get repetitive when discussing a particular concept for more than a page or two. And there are many intriguing concepts that Hesse contemplates, but the division of the soul into hundreds, or thousands of different personalities is perhaps the essential point of the novel.

Harry goes to visit a professor friend of his who has a picture of Goethe. Goethe is an old man in the portrait, but very luxuriously pictured--not at all Harry's concept of the noble poet. This leads to a row, and then a bar visit, where Harry meets Hermine. She immediately seems to understand him, and signals a new phase in his life.

There is a curious scene where Hermine asks Harry to guess her name. He knows that he recognizes something in her face from his own past, and he comes to the same realization as Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain about Clavdia, the object of his affections. In Clavdia, Hans sees Hippe and in Hermine, Harry sees Herman--both friends from their youth of the same sex. This is a vaguely peculiar coincidence, as The Magic Mountain and Steppenwolf are contemporaneous, as Hesse is two years younger than Mann, as both went on to win the Nobel. It does seem that Hesse may have borrowed this particular trope, but one cannot claim that it fails to comply with the theme of "personality division." Later, when Hermine dresses as a boy for the Masked Ball, or is often described as "boyish," it seems to beg more questions of homosexual "potentialities" than any other portion--but no direct link or answer is proposed. See here for previous example: http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/01/magic-mountain-thomas-mann.html

Later Hermine introduces Harry to her friend Pablo, a saxophonist that offers him funny cigarettes, rejuvenating powder, and a threesome with him and Hermine. As soon as the book shifts into this phase, it becomes wild and crazy. You forget you are reading something written in the twenties. The Masked Ball is transformed into the Magic Theater, and Pablo becomes the Host that offers its delights to Harry.

The Magic Theater sequence is the climax of the novel and its most creative moment. The kinds of experience one could have in the Magic Theater are only possible via two avenues: dreams, or hallucinations prompted by psychedelics. Harry is offered a strange cigarette upon entrance, and later enters an array of doors leading into different worlds. The first is a world of anarchy, demolition derby, and ideological Marxist murder. Another is a series of living memories of every single woman he has ever loved. Another is a chess game that will teach him how to "build up his personality."

The novel ends in the Magic Theater with Harry talking to Mozart, trying to come to some kind of epiphany about what he has experienced. His journey is a happy one, for the most part, despite a gruesome scene or two, and it seems quite clear that Harry's dilemma is solved by "healing" and not "death and destruction."

I would recommend Steppenwolf for anyone feeling particularly depressed or hopeless, and though I found it to be profound on several levels, had a difficult time "getting into it" or moving quickly through it--except for the last thirty pages.

There is one more personal quality I share with this novel, and it is a short story I wrote in December 2007, prompted by a dream. The story ended up being about a "secret museum" devoted to suicide. There are different attractions inside the museum that lead its audience into some kind of deeper understanding of their personality, or station in life. A friend recommended Steppenwolf and mentioned that it reminded him of that story. And indeed, upon reading it, I was seized with many wonderful feelings of deja vu, leading me to reflect upon the boundaries of the imagination, and the similarities of imaginations. It also made me feel better about that short story. Obviously it does not have the same scope as this novel, but to have written something so eerily similar without any kind of foreknowledge makes me feel like I must have been doing something right. The wait for publication beats on...

Hiatus

Flying Houses will be going on hiatus--for a little while at least.

The reason is similar to the last hiatus--at the beginning of 2009, due to the consumption of The Magic Mountain (http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/01/magic-mountain-thomas-mann.html). Underworld (http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/04/underworld-don-delillo.html) should have been a hiatus too, but I consider modern novelists to be less daunting than those born in the 19th century.

Now, I expect to read another book about law while on vacation in Florida in the next couple of weeks, and that may inspire a post--but beyond that, the reason this time is Ulysses--generally considered one of the monumental works in the history of letters. I am about 200 pages into it--or 1/4 of the way through. I expect to be finished by Thanksgiving, or Christmas (hopefully by 2010 I will be able to consider myself "sort of well-read.")

In the meantime, be strong. This is a difficult period in our history and I am sure by the next time I post something even more messed up will have happened to the world. Flying Houses will not save us all, but it is a pleasant distraction, is it not?

Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann (original review)

While I have already posted a review of Buddenbrooks, I mentioned in that post that I had wasted an hour of my life writing this earlier review. Well, I found that a draft had been saved on the online server, so I am providing it as an example of what happens when you have to write the same thing twice, and how different it can come out, and why this is my serious issue with revision.

When I started off Flying Houses with a review of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, I stated that I hadn't yet read Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain, but I was going to read them as soon as I could. Now, this afternoon I have finished Buddenbrooks, and it is equally as affecting as Doctor Faustus, though without the slow build-up that I complained of in that novel. As I mentioned in that first review, the first two hundred pages of Dr. Faustus were rather dense and difficult to get through, but once they had sunk in, the rest of the novel was a total pleasure.



In my opinion there are no weak spots in Buddenbrooks. Though Mann is a literary master for succeeding on every level categorically, perhaps his ability to create characters truly drawn from real life stands out as his greatest artistic gift. The plot of this novel can be explained very vaguely--it's about the decline of a family over four generations. They are a German family with a patriarch named Johann, born around 1770, a son named Jean, and grandchildren Antonie, Thomas, and Christian. While the novel moves slowly at first, taking time to establish old Johann and his wife, their own marriage slightly complicated, with one other son named Gotthold who has been shut out of the family for not working for the family firm and marrying appropriately to his class. It's in the characters that the plot of the novel is contained.



Antonie, also called Tony, is first the most deeply developed character. She really enjoys all of the niceties that come with being a Buddenbrook. It's easy to spoil a lot of the plot elements by writing a review. A lot of people, when they write reviews of this book, just completely go off and talk about stuff that happens all the way through the book, without any sense of not spoiling the fun for the reader. If you can call reading this book "fun" that is--though that is a joke. It is an excellent novel on every level, but it is of very depressing subject matter. However, if you yourself are not the most successful person on the planet, if you want to see someone else struggle, if you think you can gain something from reading about their troubles, well you may have found quite the book. I am always amazed by the fact that of all the different facets and hobbies in my life, it is always the book I am reading which seems to reflect my present state of being. Well, I will just say about Antonie that she falls in love, and for whatever reason she can't marry him, and so she embarks upon a life of quite bad luck, so that it seems if her first initial question of love had been better answered, so many unfortunate fates may have been spared her.



But she is not the only one. Thomas, generally known as the most respectable character in the novel, obsessed with his appearance, a town official, a Senator, the head of the family firm at its most delicate period yet, maintains a rigid, empirical approach to life. However, it is not long before he begins to suffer from depression, and the way Mann describes his personality and his exterior--the "mask" he adorns for business affairs--is truly heart-rending. Thomas is a tragic character mostly because he is the one for whom all the pressure of the firm rests upon--everyone relies on him, and the strain is brought to such a degree that it would nauseate anyone, though in truth it appears that those are the sort of feelings one inevitably does have in life. It is overwhelming in what it asks of you, and Thomas is the best character I have ever read to personify that concept. The only character really concerned about the numbers, true accountability.



Christian is a more typical literary character, and of course one I enjoy immensely and find great comfort in. He is a dabbler in the arts, who likes to go to the theater, and likes to do impressions of people that everyone in his family knows. And he has travels all over and he spends holiday gatherings telling stories about the depravity of a woman he met named Maria (with the family always not knowing how to respond), some English guy he knew named Johnny Thunderstorm, and other stories from the club where he always hangs out. In the very first scene, as a boy Christian has a digestive issue after dinner, and throughout the novel he has little medical issues that keep cropping up that he continues to exagerrate. The pain in his left side, for example, and the trouble with his nerves. Eventually he uses it as an excuse to not be able to work, and finally he starts talking about how he had been doing some experiment with a bottle and some kind of gas which nearly exploded and exploded all of his neighbors with him, or how whenever he saw an open window he had the great sudden urge to jump out of it, or how lately he had been sleeping in bed to look up and see man sitting on his couch, nodding at him. Of course, Christian is the greatest "failure" in the novel. He earns practically nothing and gets by on his inheritance parititioned out to him by his brother. I won't say what happens to him at the end though that is also commonly pointed out as if its no big deal. But I will say that he and Tony are the characters with the greatest longevity in the novel--they're there from beginning to end.



The book reaches its climax in the character of little Johann, or Hanno as he is called, the only child of Thomas Buddenbrook, whose wife Gerda is an accomplished violinist from Amsterdam, and who instills a deep love of music in the boy. She gets him a harmonium, and he increasingly spends time improvising on it, which is upsetting to Thomas, who expects him to take over the family firm and keep their name alive. He has one close friend named Kai who wants to be a writer and is really the only to lend him emotional support, besides his mother. The way the novel ends was rather crazy, in my opinion, and I have to call it a movement of genius, (like Leverkuhn's final symphony ending to Doctor Faustus), which has a chapter with a surprisingly detailed day of studies at school, which then spells out all of Hanno's fears about the impending struggle before him, and especially, most beautifully, more beautifully than any other passage in the book, I noticed the next two pages were of one massive paragraph, describing in detail how Hanno played on the harmonium that night, the "simple motif" he had developed longer, and longer to heartbreaking effect at its end. The passage is one of the most lyrical I have ever laid eyes on, and if what I have read is true, it is supposedly a summary of the aesthetic principles that went into the work of the writing of the novel itself. It is not so different from Faustus in the way it uses music as a meta-reflection of literature, at least in the character of the artistic soul of Hanno.



Buddenbrooks is a novel that I had never heard anyone talk about, or remembered hearing anyone talk about, in my entire life. Thus it is probably "out of fashion" and for some specific reason--maybe it is just too long? Regardless it is a work of great emotional depth that....

Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann

As far as reviews go, I feel it is appropriate to mention that a critic's knowledge of an artist's entire oeuvre is certainly indispensable when situating a work in a greater context. In the case of Thomas Mann, I have yet to read (and I greatly look forward to) The Buddenbrooks, or The Magic Mountain, or The Confessions of Felix Krull, or "Mario and the Magician," but I have read a collection of his early short stories and I did read Doctor Faustus, which is more than you can say for the vast majority of this current American populace. Little does it matter that Mann composed Faustus in California in the mid 1940's after escaping Nazi Germany. What Americans read German authors, even if they are amongst the all-time greatest, and only removed little more than a hundred years from Generation Y2K? Ambitious, literary Americans will embrace a Fitzgerald, a Hemingway, a Salinger, and they may even be brave enough to embrace a Kafka, but Mann is in different territory. To be sure, Kafka is far more famous, but to be sure, Mann is far more decorated. The Magic Mountain earned him the Nobel Prize when he was 54 years old. Faustus was published shortly after his 70th birthday. After reading only 750 pages or so of Mann's prose, I feel compelled to review his final book, so excited (and intimidated) I am to move forward into the rest of his oeuvre. I plan to read The Buddenbrooks next, immediately upon completion of my second novel, and to finish it before I begin my third. If you do not already realize that Mann has seriously changed the way I thought about writing, then you probably do not understand why I am writing anything at all in the first place.

I have read that Dr. Faustus was originally conceived as a short story, and then expanded into the 530 page epic it became. I have also read that in the first sentence of the novel, Thomas Mann meant to be providing a parody of his general syntax. Regardless of its parodic elements, I read the first chapter in a bookstore in Nantucket and decided that I must at once own this paperback novel. I would not finish reading it for another six or seven months, but once I made it through the 200th page, nothing else seemed to matter except finishing the book to see how it would end. And what an ending!

The novel concerns one Dr. Serenus Zeitblom, who has been moved in his elderly age to write a biography of his lifelong (and long deceased) friend, Adrian Leverkuhn, the famous German composer. The first 200 pages describe their early years together, and goes to great lengths to emphasize the importance of one of their instructors, Kretzschmar, apparently very influential to the young Leverkuhn. The beginning is extremely difficult because it often dissolves into lengthy discussions by the youthful characters on philosophy and Nationalism. Whether this sort of dialogue is believable or not, I cannot tell, but one thing for sure that I know is that people today are about one hundred times stupider than any single one of the many intimately-felt characters in this novel. I mean that they are incapable of communicating on the level of these characters. To look back on Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and consider the philosophical discussions in that text is to witness a century of reduction happening by a mere 20 years difference in age, and a different country in the midst of prosperity, as opposed to another country building towards a terrible climax.

As soon as Leverkuhn finishes his studies and begins living in boarding houses and going around with his new friend Rudolf Schildknapp, the novel begins to pick up and the scenes seem more carefully chosen. By the last 150 pages, barely anything is contained that is not absolutely essential and revelatory. In the first chapter, Zeitblom briefly mentions genius, and attempts to come up with a tidy definition of it. As the novel evolves, genius becomes its principle theme, and to get to the heart of why I find this book so essential, so classic, so deserving of canonization, to read Thomas Mann's reflections on genius is to sit before someone you can actually believe rather than thinking them boring and pointless. Genius may go unnoticed by peers and genius may be good for little in this age of great technological equalization (not!), but it still requires genius to be a successful artist, and Mann's portrait of Leverkuhn, as special a circumstance as it may be, gives one hope that greatness is not unreachable so long as all the elements are in their appropriate place.

Notable is Zeitblom's self-consciousness as a narrator. I do enjoy his digressions about how hard the book is to write, and about how he has been unfair to the reader by making some chapters too long, and his musings on the present condition of his home-state, which are obviously, chaotic and dismissive. The way he sets up the reader for what they are about to see is not only hilarious, but also very accomodating for all future readers of his, because these are really the only parts that don't require a degree to begin to understand. That said, most of the general plot of the novel is also rather simple--it is in the intricacies of Mann's language that most readers will be left in the dust.

Consider Chapter XXV, which Zeitblom opens up bombastically, stating that now, in this important 25th chapter, he will reveal Adrian's secret manuscript which he has kept concealed from the reader until the appropriate time. (It may be important for me to note that I have not read Goethe's or Marlowe's version of the same fable, and those familiar with it will intuit what the 25th chapter contains). Zeitblom exits as narrator, and Leverkuhn takes the reader on a 30 page fevered-dream/vision/hallucination which will directly lead to his artistic dominance over the following twenty-four years of his life. What Adrian must give up is not only his soul, but also the ability to love anyone else.

The final requirement of his agreement becomes responsible for arguably the most beautiful sections of the book. He begins courting one Inez Rodde, through the violinist friend of his Rudi Schwerdtfeger, and becomes part of a circle of artists, intellectuals, and bourgeois dilletantes interested in the pose of appreciating art. My personal favorite character is Frau Knoterich, who, besides sharing the same suffix as my surname, is a morphine addict who eventually converts her entire circle of friends to that same illicit practice. Mann's brief description of her practices in the throes of addiction alone show the kind of sensitive detail that all too many modern novelists would shelve in favor of shock value. But to return from the digression, the ending is arguably one of the saddest and most beautiful in all of literature.

It begins with the entrance of Neppo (or "Echo" as he calls himself), Adrian's four-year-old nephew who stays with him and becomes a cherished object to him and everyone that meets him. A tragedy slowly develops, and Adrian's exclamation to Zeitblom after everything has happened remains the only time I can recall that he shows any sort of emotion whatsoever. The effect is undeniable to any reader adventerous enough to stick with Mann through all the seemingly boring episodes of Adrian's sheltered emotional life. I wanted to cry, and I still want to cry when I think about that exclamation.

But the book would have no ending without the presentation of Leverkuhn's final symphony, the eponymously-referential "Lamentation of Dr. Faustus," which Zeitblom believes is his greatest work to date. Adrian invites all of his friends, nearly every major character in the novel to appear, to his home for the presentation of this magnum opus, and he "makes a scene," to put it simply. I tried to tell a friend of mine what happened in the scene but he stopped me, saying he didn't want me to ruin it for him. Yes, I do not want to ruin it for anyone, but it is such a good ending! It is hilarious, it is horrible, and it is totally perfectly the way the novel should end.

But it goes on even another chapter, to describe the circumstances of Adrian's later life. This too, must not be ruined, but I must admit I was suprised to see it continue on the way it did. Regardless, the final page of the novel was excellent, and Mann doesn't finish before he gets in his final word about Germany, which, considering the timing of the novel, seems rather accurate, but in hindsight, appears rather extreme, though not without its obvious point. On the back of the novel, the publisher states that Adrian's rise mirrors that of the Third Reich in Germany, but honestly I could not see the parallels, except for Zeitblom's personal musings on the status quo.

There are few times one has to read for absolute pleasure anymore, and while an ordinary reader may not derive much pleasure from the beginning of Dr. Faustus, if they are able to stick with it, to see the value in it, they will be vastly rewarded upon completing it (and perhaps may be forfeiting more than they realize).