Volume 22, Number 13 · August 7, 1975
The 'Doctor Faustus' Case
By Robert Craft
Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a Friend
by Thomas Mann, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter
Vintage, 510 pp., $2.75 (paper)
The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of "Doctor Faustus"
by Thomas Mann, translated by Richard Winston, by Clara Winston
Knopf, 242 pp., $4.95
Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus": The Sources and Structure of the Novel
by Gunilla Bergsten, translated by Krishna Winston
University of Chicago Press, 246 pp., $10.00
Faust as Musician: A Study of Thomas Mann's Novel "Doctor Faustus"
by Patrick Carnegy
New Directions, 182 pp., $9.25
The career of Thomas Mann's modern Faust is intended to illustrate the political, artistic, and religious dilemmas of the author's time. Yet paradoxically, the story of a former divinity student who bargains his soul and body to become a 'musician of genius' is set in the wrong historical era. And the book's major flaw as fiction—counting as minor blemishes the discursiveness, and the imbalance between theory in the first half, story development and human variety in the second—may be attributed to conflicts between Mann's symbolic and realistic intentions.
Review, 3846 words
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