#whatireadovershabbat Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: The Life of German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
A deal with the devil never goes your way. Thomas Mann’s last great novel is about a composer who makes such a deal and the heights and depths to which he is taken for it. At least that’s what the narrator says. As you read on, you realize that the book is no less about the deal with the devil Germany made with Nazism. Mann writes as a German devastated by the blood pact his country made with a madman. The result is a searing philosophical novel about love, history, and the price of civilization, told as a story of friendship and of thwarted and fulfilled ambition. There’s nothing quite like it in world literature.
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