Author won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and
influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of
North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office
aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale,
Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study
art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in
Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing.
He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel,
was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had
sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great
novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first
volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. IN 1933 Thomas Mann
left Germany for Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits,
in 1938 he settled in the United States, where he wrote Doctor
Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the
US was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He
revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in
1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were
written and where he died in 1955.
A superior new translation of Mann's 1901 saga about four generations of an affluent German family. (July)
The reissue of Mann's wonderful first novel in a new translation is a cause for rejoicing. In loving, ironic, and sympathetic detail, Mann portrays several generations of a merchant family who belong to the bourgeois aristocracy in Lubeck, tracking them from high point to decline. While the author himself helped Lowe-Porter in the authorized English translation (1938), Woods simply has a better ear for dialog and for smoothing Mann's German syntax into a more naturally flowing English one. He is even so bold as to tackle puns that Lowe-Porter pretended weren't there. Highly recommended.-- Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
