What are you currently reading?

[Florestan]

I found it difficult when I first tried reading it some five years ago, and I gave up, but now I can't remember why. I hadn't read any other Mann at that point. He's now one of my favorite authors, and I ought to revisit it. I liked the bits where a character lectures on Beethoven's late piano sonatas.

Doktor Faustus is my favorite of Mann's novels I have read. It was love at first sight when I first read in my twenties and since then I re-read it three times --- each time it was the same page-turner and had the same charm. FWIW, I found / find it easier than The Magic Mountain.

One of my favorite parts is right there at the beginning: the description of the physical appearance and the musical characteristics of the instruments in the shop of Leverkuhn's uncle. The bit about the trumpet's evoking the languorous cantilena, the heroic mood has stuck in my mind and I find it a perfectly apt description of Hummel's marvelous Trumpet Concerto (so I fancy that Mann had it in mind when writing that bit).

The whole book is marvelous and @Ganondorf is in for a real treat.

[vers la flamme]

You all are making me want to read it. (FWIW, I have yet to make it all the way through Zauberberg, either... I find certain elements of the book "triggering" to my hypochondriac self, to the point that I wonder whether that wasn't absolutely Mann's intention  )

[Florestan]

The Romanian translation I read also contains an explanatory essay Mann wrote a few years later, titled "How I wrote Doktor Faustus", a very interesting glimpse into the various intellectual, political and personal undercurrents which contributed to the final product. I don't know if the English or Finnish editions have it.

[Florestan]

You all are making me want to read it.

And I suddenly feel the urge to re-read it. 

[vers la flamme]

I think I read this in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, but there was apparently an incident in which Arnold Schoenberg encountered Thomas Mann's wife in a Los Angeles supermarket, and gave her a mouthful about how he felt that her husband unfairly portrayed him in the character of Leverkühn, shouting "it's all a lie, I never had syphilis". Great story, if true.

[Florestan]

I think I read this in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, but there was apparently an incident in which Arnold Schoenberg encountered Thomas Mann's wife in a Los Angeles supermarket, and gave her a mouthful about how he felt that her husband unfairly portrayed him in the character of Leverkühn, shouting "it's all a lie, I never had syphilis". Great story, if true.

If it were true, it wouldn't be to Schoenberg's credit, because it would mean he was unable to make the difference between literature/art and reality/life --- a strange shortcoming given he was an artist himself.   

[vers la flamme]

If it were true, it wouldn't be to Schoenberg's credit, because it would mean he was unable to make the difference between literature/art and reality/life --- a strange shortcoming given he was an artist himself.   

Perhaps not, though he must have come to his senses since he didn't, to my knowledge, venture a libel suit. (Though it's doubtful he'd have gotten anywhere with it; as I recall, the biographical details of Leverkühn couldn't be more different than those of Schoenberg.)