Thomas Mann

The title and nineteenth-century framework suggest a great social novel centered on the decline of an upper-bourgeois mercantile family. As often happens with great books, as one delves deeper into the reading (and we imagine the same occurred for the author while writing it), another theme emerges: the unstoppable force driving toward dissolution, decay, and death. To express the novel’s profou

What mystery lies behind this novel that accompanied Thomas Mann throughout his entire life? Begun in 1910 and later abandoned, it was taken up again in 1954, a year before the author's death. Thomas Mann imagines a singular character—an enchanter or mere charlatan—recounting his life, and does so beginning with an emblematic episode of his youth. Still a boy, he is taken by his father to the ci

The protagonist is a renowned man of letters. > He had never known idleness, never the carefree negligence of youth . He had led > a life of self-conquest and of "in spite of all," a harsh, tenacious, and temperate life, which he had shaped into a symbol of a delicate heroism commensurate with the times . Yet deep within him there had always been an inner restlessness, “a strange expansion