A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature,
Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding
writer--"the starched collar," as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in
fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh
renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion
Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of Mann's
genius.
The headliner of this volume, "Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow" (in
its first new translation since 1936)--a subtle masterpiece that reveals
the profound emotional significance of everyday life--is Mann's tender
but sharp-eyed portrait of the "Bigs" and "Littles" of the bourgeois
Cornelius family as they adjust to straitened circumstances in
hyperinflationary Weimar Germany. Here, too, is a free-standing excerpt
from Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks--a sensation when it was first
published. "Death in Venice" (also included in this volume) is Mann's
most famous story, but less well known is that he intended it to be a
diptych with another, comic story--included here as "Confessions of a
Con Artist, by Felix Krull." "Louisey"--a tale of sexual humiliation
that gives a first glimpse of Mann's lifelong ambivalence about the
power of art--rounds out this revelatory, transformative collection.
