Doctor Faustus is one of those books that I admired more than enjoyed. Like The Magic Mountain, it's a "dizzyingly rich novel of ideas." However, the ideas in Doctor Faustus are much heavier and (consequently?) presented less satirically. It was perhaps difficult in 1947 to be light-hearted about the rise of Nazism and the destruction of German culture.
The most consequential aesthetic decisions Mann made were using music as its foundational metaphor and having a first-person narrator. The first decision pays off brilliantly, because the music theory is interesting for its own sake as well as embodying Mann's ideas about intellectualism versus sensualism, barbarism versus culture, and progressivism versus conservatism. These antitheses wrap around to meet each other. The second decision is less successful, because Mann is stylistically trapped in the humorless temperament of his narrator Serenus Zeitblom.
(As an aside, I did find humor in many of the character names. Griepenkerl the bassoonist, Helmut Institoris, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, Rudiger Schildknapp, Deutschlin and Dungersheim. These may be ordinary German names but they struck me as overly elaborate and funny.)
The title of the book foregrounds the composer Adrian Leverkühn's supposed pact with the Devil. My hot take is that the pact is not fundamental to the story. Leverkühn's artistic development flows from the powerful cultural forces that Mann examines, and his personal development flows from his character and his syphilis; his meeting with the demon changes nothing.
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