2025 Readings 118

 There should be (probably is) a literary category for authors that you passionately love/hate. My champion would be Thomas Mann. I've read Death in Venice three times, during dramatically different periods of my life, and, although loving little snippets, never warmed to it. I've read Magic Mountain twice, and am definitely looking forward to reading it a third (and hopefully fourth and fifth time), but there are sections of it which I don't like. I love Magic Mountain, and my farewell email to Champlain (which I write and edit when I'm awake at 3:00 in the morning) references it, but there are sections when I find myself thinking (sometimes saying): "Will you please shut up!?" So, I'm not talking about those sections of your favorite author which should glide through, but a much stronger antipathy. With Mann it's mainly where he's just showing off, where he's going beyond just showing us that one of his characters is painfully full of himself or arrogant or remarkably oblivious - and instead he's just trumpeting his own impressive education/intelligence or just talking to himself. In Magic Mountain the scenes that I love far exceed the scenes that make me wish that he had employed a more forceful editor. I can't say that about Doctor Faustus, his last major novel, which I finished this morning. There were scenes in it which were breathtaking, but also scenes that took the patience of a saint (no pun intended) to get through. Unless you're a true, devout Mann fan I don't think I would recommend it. It's the story, mainly, of Adrian Leverkuhn, a brilliant German composer who, as you might expect from the title, might or might not have sold his soul to the devil. When it works it's a wonderful metaphor for the Germany that sold its soul to Hitler and Fascism. The problem is that it often strays very far afield from that theme, and unless you have that metaphor in your mind it's easy to completely lose track of any sort of central theme. It's not as if there aren't a thousand things and characters in Magic Mountain, but it simply holds together much cleaner. Is it possible that I'll read Doctor Faustus again? Sure, because there were a lot of great moments, especially when the storyteller, Leverkuhn's lifelong friend, steps back to reflect upon the situation in Germany during World War II (the story is a reflection covering a couple decades).

On a somewhat related note, I just found out that there's a Thomas Mann Museum in Nida, Lithuania (Mann had a summer house there for a couple years before his exile), and that's now bum-rushed its way to the top of my travel wishlist.