I read this in college. It was okay.

Doctor Faustus is the life of a fictitious musician, the tragic hero of this novel Adrian Leverkühn is told by his childhood friend, named after his last piano score, The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus.

"Must I not ask if I was right in do­ing so? And again: Did I actually do so? I have clung to one man, one painfully important man, unto death and have described his life, which never ceased to fill me with loving fear. It is as if this loyalty may well have made up for my having fled in horror from my country's guilt."

This book reminded me of [b:Lord Jim|12194|Lord Jim|Joseph Conrad|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1372366969l/12194._SX50_.jpg|2578988] by Joseph Conrad. While the two stories are not alike, they share a fascinating way of exploring a character. The narrator beautifully portrays the protagonist so compellingly and with infatuation that you cannot help but love him.

And I weep for them both, mostly Adrian, who believed the devil inside him made everything around him wrong. But don't we all feel that way, cursed?

Thank you W.F. Howes Ltd via NetGalley for giving me the chance to listen to Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods and beautifully narrated by David Rintoul. I have given my honest review.

Dit is werkelijk een onbeoordeelbaar boek. Maar ik onderneem toch een poging:

- 5 sterren: want wat een geniale compositie, en wat een geniaal auteur moet je zijn om dit neer te schrijven. Zo veel ideeën en zo veel symbolen: CRAZY
- 4 sterren: want ondanks de veelvoud aan ideeën mis ik toch een zekere lijn ertussen die dit duidelijk overbrengt aan de lezer. Een geniaal boek schrijven is fantastisch, maar zorgen dat de lezer het snapt, is dat ook.
- 3 sterren: want de historische context over Duitsland tijdens en tussen de Wereldoorlogen en de af en toe opflakkerende verhaallijn zijn interessant en maken dit quasi-onleesbaar boek toch nog een beetje leesbaar.
- 2 sterren: want ondanks de leesbare stukken, heb ik me zo ontzettend hard door dit boek heen moeten worstelen. Maar echt, zo ontzettend hard.
- 1 ster: want Thomas Mann besteedt 2/3 van zijn boek aan de uitgebreide beschrijving van klassieke muziek op een manier die zelfs voor klassieke-muziek-adepten uitdagend is. Voor leken zoals ik is het eigenlijk ronduit onleesbaar.

Kortom, als ik alle 4 en 5*-sterren-reviews hier zie op Goodreads, dan kan ik alleen besluiten dat ik nog wat intellectuele boterhammetjes zal moeten eten om echt mee te kunnen met Thomas Mann. Al zou ik ook een hoge rating kunnen geven voor dat extreem bevredigende gevoel van opluchting dat het boek eindelijk uit is. Danku Thomas Mann.

I am giving this book four stars instead of five, but I think the shortcoming is in me rather than in the book.

After reading the 700+ pages of "The Magic Mountain", I read a short lecture by Mann on the book in which he advised that readers should read it twice. It may take me a while to build up the strength of will to do that, but I think I understood exactly what he meant, and I think it applies to "Faustus" as well.

I can't judge directly since I'm reading in translation, but having read two Mann novels translated by two different people, I think I can reasonably say that he is not a particularly impressive prose stylist. Oddly enough, I also don't think he creates especially compelling characters--most of them play fairly well-defined roles, and only the protagonists (Hans Castorp, Adrian Leverkuhn) seem to change at all. But somehow I still think Mann is a fantastic author. I'm not quite sure that I can articulate why, but my best attempt would be something like: his mastery comes in the way that he places characters and situations in relation to one another, and allows those relations to change subtly over time.

That sounds extremely abstract, I realize. I think Mann's treatment of the Faust story in this book is a good example. In the world of the book, the Faust story exists--Goethe, Gounod, etc. On top of that, we have Adrian making his own Faustian bargain, and we are left some leeway in how literally we would like to interpret it. Thirdly, we have the story of the rise of Nazi Germany, which occurred before the writing of the book, but in the book is contemporaneous with the narrator's recording of the story and to some extent with the end of the story itself. What's more, Mann's narrator makes these connections explicit, discussing the Faustian nature of the Nazi rise to power. In this sense Mann as an author is very much like a musical composer--and that is not an original observation; it is a thesis that Mann himself advanced--creating a theme and developing it by repeating it in various forms.

It also, I think, largely accounts for my feeling that these books deserve more than one reading. With classical music, I find I can almost never really enjoy a performance unless I have listened to the piece several times and know what to listen for. In the book, in fact, I think Mann has Leverkuhn speak this argument through his position that a musical composition need not be performed to be recognized as a masterpiece, and indeed, that performance may be detrimental to that judgment.