Brilliant...a little masterpiece.--Chicago Sun-Times
Beautiful...one of the best short novels he has written.--New York
Times Book Review
Can rank with the best of Mann's writing.--The Boston Globe
Magnificent...one of the greatest bits of writing which one of the
world's greatest writers has ever given us.--Chicago Herald-American
Brilliant...one of those splendid novelettes which in this reviewer's
opinion represent the very essence of Mr. Mann's literary
art.--Saturday Review of Literature
Thomas Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new
translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and
direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and less accurate
English version done by Helen Lowe-Porter for the original
publication.)...What is especially noteworthy about The Tables of the
Law among Mann's fictions is its playfulness. --Robert Alter, London
Review of Books
His senses were hot, and so he yearned for spirituality, purity, and
holiness--the invisible, which seemed to him spiritual, holy, and pure.
Thus Thomas Mann introduces Moses in The Tables of the Law, the Nobel
Prize winner's retelling of the prophet's life. Invited in 1943 to write
this story as a defense of the Decalogue, Mann reveals how strange and
forbidding Moses' task was. As the Lawgiver--endowed with the wrists and
hands of a stonemason--engraves the tablets, so he hews the souls of his
people:
Into the stone of the mountain I carved the ABC of human behavior, but
it shall also be carved into your flesh and blood, Israel...
Mann's tale of the ethical founding and molding of a people sharply
rebukes the Nazis for their intended destruction of the moral code set
down in the Ten Commandments. But does his famous irony and authorial
license mock or enhance the Biblical account of the shaping of the
Jewish people? You know the Bible story. Now read Mann's version--it
will grip you anew.
Newly translated from the German by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann.
To present the foundation of law for half the world is no simple task.
The Tables of the Law is a historical title following Moses as he is
tasked by God to present the ten commandments, providing a human and
much different insight on the role of Moses as the Prophet of God.
Expertly translated, The Tables of the Law is a solid addition to any
literary fiction collection.--Midwest Book Review
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
His many works include Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and
Confessions of Felix Krull.
Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann co-authored a biography of the
pianist Rudolf Serkin and have together translated Nietzsche's Human,
All Too Human.
Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor
of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
