Doctor Faustus (Everyman's Library)

About this book

Thomas Mann wrote his last great novel Doctor Faustus during his exile from Nazi Germany. Although he already had a long string of masterpieces to his name in retrospect this seems to be the novel he was born to write. A modern reworking of the Faust legend in which a twentieth-century composer sells his soul to the devil for the artistic power he craves the story brilliantly interweaves music philosophy theology and politics. Adrian Leverkhn is a talented young composer who is willing to go to any lengths to reach greater heights of achievement. What he gets is twenty-four years of geniusyears of increasingly extraordinary musical innovation intertwined with progressive and destructive madness. A scathing allegory of Germanys renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism Doctor Faustus is also a profound meditation on artistic genius. Obsessively exploring the evil into which his country had fallen Mann succeeds as only he could have in charting the dimensions of that evil; his novel has both the pertinence of history and the universality of myth. Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter