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Doctor Faustus

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Doctor Faustus

By: Thomas Mann
Narrated by: David Rintoul
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About this listen

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.

Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius—both national and individual—and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist.

"John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece."—The New Yorker

"Doctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods."—The New Republic

Public Domain (P)2024 Ukemi Audiobooks Christian Fiction Classics Classics & Allegories Genre Fiction Psychological World Literature

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Critic reviews

'Arguably the great German novel'—New York Times
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I thought that I'd give Thomas Mann's work a 'go' - I was quite disappointed in the story but David Rintoul's charismatic narration renders the tome, tolerable.

Branching out ....

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After Magic Mountain I longed to return to the pages of Thomas Mann so perfectly rendered by David Rimbault. The main character is sort of ridiculous, the long treatises on music tedious to the uninitiated , the parallel between friend and Fatherland heavy handed - yet it is vintage Mann, beautiful sentences and loads of them , Mitteleuropa ironic restraint, Proustian sketches of pre war intelligentsia types , in such a huge implausible, ambitious oeuvre …. Bravo to the Master

Unstable, flawed, verbose, brilliant

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