The 3 best books by the enormous Thomas Mann

No one knows what kind of writer he would have been Thomas Mann in a Europe free of wars. But in the circumstances in which he lived, from the First to the Second World War, with the period between the wars and the final post-war period included, his political involvement as an intellectual bastion never left him indifferent, no matter what it cost him. The curious thing is that Thomas Mann became an idealist on both sides, turning progressively to the left as Nazism was gaining space and applying its force as any rule.

Exiled in several countries, a US citizen for many years until his declared leftist ideology ended up marking him also in that country whose new enemy was Russia.

Very successful author, first in his native Germany and then in the rest of the world, when his books were banned in Germany. Father of children as idealistic as him who did not hesitate to enlist in armies opposed to Nazism. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.

Undoubtedly a hectic life for this author, probably the best chronicler of what was experienced in Europe during the turbulent first half of the XNUMXth century.

Being an author marked by his firm convictions (although antagonistic over time) and by his circumstances, his work ends up being impregnated with that complex European reality. But a basic reading also involves an introductory exercise in good literature.

3 Recommended Novels by Thomas Mann

The magic mountain

Probably his best novel. The one that more glory and later dislikes could grant him. It is not that it is a dogmatic or political work, in any way.

But when Nazism marked Mann, this novel was particularly punished. The prospect of a Europe of dubious moral principles and in extraordinary social circumstances did not fit the brilliance of the Third Reich.

Summary: The action of this novel takes place in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Zauberberg, which recently, where two cousins ​​of very different characters coincide.

More than in the events (the acquaintance with Claudia Chauchat or with a couple of peculiar and opposed thinkers, the small conflicts generated by the coexistence between characters of very different origins, the constant trickle of deaths, etc.), the interest of the novel it resides in the perfect reproduction of the inner life, affective and intellectual, of the wide gallery of characters that Mann displays before the eyes of the reader.

Undoubtedly, The Magic Mountain is one of the best known works of Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The chosen one

Of course, the Church couldn't get by without Mann's pen giving it a good scolding. Not because of what he represents, but because of the hypocrisy regarding the denial of all internal passion.

Summary: The Chosen One is a great novel about low passions and repentance. Thomas Mann uses the figure of Gregorius, Pope Gregory V, and the gallery of characters that swarmed around him to show the rottenness of the Church of his time, but above all to explore the human soul.

Along with a compelling recreation of the time, the most attractive thing about this great novel by Mann are the thoughts, feelings, doubts and personal conflicts that its characters face.

It is attractive since there is the characteristic poetic halo and the depth of characters that characterize the work of the great German author and there is an impressive historical figure presented with all its lights and shadows, and an era reproduced with passion and fidelity.

Doctor faust

From the United States, with that perspective typical of the exile who longs for a land that feels surrendered to misfortune, Thomas Mann wrote his most transcendental novel. His uprooting permeates a plot that presents us with the classic German Faust adjusted to the circumstances of the Third Reich.

Summary: The novel takes the form of a biography, and in it Mann addresses the "catastrophic regression of a hyper-developed spirit to a primitive archaism" posing both as an individual phenomenon, that of the protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, and as one of the toughest problems that XNUMXth century Germany had to face, Doctor Faustus achieves a formal perfection and a spiritual depth that is rarely found in contemporary European fiction.