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/lit/ - Literature

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11579321 No.11579321 [Reply] [Original]

What are your favourite works of Thomas Mann? Do you guys prefer his shorter fiction or the bigger tomes? Bonus question: has anyone here actually managed to finish the Magic Mountain? I'm currently reading a collection of his early works and figured some discussion would be nice.

>> No.11579372

>>11579321
Yes I finished Magic Mountain and I thought it was a sublime experience.
Have you read Death in Venice?

>> No.11579486

>>11579372
I have not so far, but it is included in the collection I'm currently reading. Did you like it? I'm sort of worried about it because it has been discussed to death in relation to Mann's own homosexuality. Feels like I can't tackle this story independently without all that background stuff in my mind

>> No.11579503

>>11579321
I have three of his works in German and I can't bring myself to start them because my German's only developed enough to handle Der Hobbit and Er ist wieder da. I did manage to tackle Grass' memoirs in German, though.

>> No.11579521

>>11579503
What's your native language? I can imagine it's not the easiest thing for non- native speakers, especially with the sentence structures he's famous for

>> No.11579531

Reflections of an Unpolitical Man is one of my favorites.

>> No.11579540

>>11579486
The best I could say is that it is a Greek-style homosexuality. Mann even includes a story about Socrates and a young boy.
It never really descends into lust...it's more admiration and ecstasy to behold such a specimen.

>> No.11580375

>>11579321
I despised magic mountain but adored buddenbrooks. Dunno

>> No.11580385

>>11579540
Why would reading a story about homosexuality even bother you?

>> No.11580401

>>11580375
What did you dislike in magic mountain?

>> No.11580455

>>11579321
>Novels
Elder-Godtier: Dr. Faustus, Joseph
Godtier: MM, buddenbrooks
Greattier: Felix krull
Goodtier: Lotte, holy sinner
>short fic
A-tier: tonio kröger, Tristan, DiV; but rest is good as well

>> No.11580498

>>11580385
It didn't that's my point.

>> No.11580511

>>11579540
>It never really descends into lust
Did we read the same story? It charts his decline quite viscerally

>> No.11581821

>>11579321
read Dr Faustus in English, it's a pretty fkn wild book.

i love the archetype of nihilist pseuds who get cult energy from a genuine death-worshipper, the pseuds in this book (the Kridwiss group, i think they're called; there's a bloke amongst them that tries to incorporate ancient sagas into his conception of evolutionary biology) kinda remind me of the pseuds in Dosto's Demons.

anyone got any other recs for tragic dilettantes in literature?