10년 이상을 읽으려고 벼르다가 이제야 이제 되었다.
이제야 그 실체에 조금은 접근한 느낌이랄까, 작가를 존경하지 않을 수 없게 만든다.
이렇게 슬플 수 있다니. 책을 닫는 순간 눈물이 왈칵 쏟아졌다. 야곱의 슬픔이 곧 나의 슬픔이였다. 참으로 많이 기다린 결혼과 출산이였는데 아내가 이렇게 갔다. 그것도 길거리에서. 너무 슬퍼서 야곱이 원망스러웠기도 했다.
일어 아마존 손님 리뷰
테츠로
5성급 중 5.0 중동의 "계약의 백성"의 행동 양식
2021년 2월 3일에 확인됨
첫 번째 부분은 요셉의 아버지 야곱의 어린 날 이야기입니다.
젊은 야곱은 삼촌 라반에게 몸을 대고, 따뜻한 경영 수완을 발휘해, 삼촌 일가를 풍기는 동시에, 자신은 그 이상으로 부를 쌓아, 가족이나 노예도 얻고 25년 후에 고향에 돌아왔다. 그 경위를 구약성서는 『창세기』에서 22페이지(제27장부터 35장)를 걸쳐 이야기하고 있지만, 토마스 맨은 약 300페이지에 걸쳐 상세히 설명하고 있다.
젊은 야곱은 눈이 나쁜 아버지 이삭을 속이고 쌍둥이 형 에사우가 얻을 것이다 축복을 빼앗았다. 에사우의 분노를 피하기 위해 야곱은 팔레스타인의 집을 벗어나 유프라테스 강 상류 지역의 마을 하란 성 밖에 사는 백부 라반의 집으로 몸 하나로 갔다. 라반은 처음 야곱을 노인으로 고용하고 양을 돌보거나 농사를 짓기로 결정했다. 그 시작에, 야곱은 자신을 높이 팔고자 하고, 라반은 무일물로 굴러 온 야곱을 사려고 하고, 이야기가 붙은 곳에서 계약서 작성을 위해 성벽의 마을 안의 법원에 간다. 시작의 협상은 다음과 같이 이루어진다.
야곱 "나는 원래 목자이기 때문에 양을 길들이는 방법을 알고 있고, 잘 일할 수 있을 것입니다. 도 서 있지 않는 인간이 되자 등이라고는 생각하지 않았습니다 "라반 "좋아.
" 나에게는 합리적인 것이고, 나에게는 그것을 잃지 않을 것입니다. 내일은 그것을 계약서로하자
. 했다. 이를 이용함으로써 수로 소유자에게 지금까지 지불했던 고액의 사용료를 절약할 수 있게 되었다. 거기서 야곱과 라반은 계약 갱신의 토론을 했다.
라반 「너는 내게, 이걸로 한 달이 한번 쏟아지게 되었는데... 하고 있는 임금을 지불하고 있다.너의 덕도 있어 물을 발견할 수 있어 물이 솟고 있는 그 구멍을 점토로 긁어, 물을 통하는 통이나 벽돌로 만들기 시작하고 있다.그리고 연못도 하나 파는 것 그리고 그 연못의 구멍의 크기도 측정했고, 정원도 만들려고 하면, 일도 많아져, 너의 팔의 힘 이외에 아직 소사를 고용해, 그 소사들에게 음식이나 입는 것 하루에 8 세라의 곡물을 지불하지 않으면 안됩니다. 너는 지금까지 육친으로서의 마음으로부터, 우리의 계약에 의해 무보상으로 일해 왔다.그러나, 어떤 것일까, 우리는 새로운 계약을 맺기로 하자. 고용 된 소사들에게는 임금을 지불하고 조카의 너에게는 임금을 지불하지 않는다. 사라질 것입니다. 그렇다면 너의 주문을 말하고 싶다. 다른 소사들에게 지불하는 임금은 너에게도 지불 할 계획이다. 와 같은 수의 년간 여기에서 일해 주고, 나의 밭이 휴경기에 들어가, 흙이 놀고, 파종도 수확도 하지 않을 때까지 이 나의 곳에서 일하는 계약을 해 주면, 너에게는 다른 소사들에게 받는 임금보다 조금 분발해도 좋다.
1번째와 2번째도 그 후에도 계약이 바뀔 때마다 야곱과 라반은 성벽 내 마을의 재판관에게 가서 합의 내용이 점토판에 “왕의 이름에 의해 그렇게 찬성되었다. 당사자 중 어느 한 사람이 계약서의 한 통을 넘겼다. 했다. 우리는 기독교의 수용 모두 ‘구약성경’을 배우고 유대민족은 ‘계약의 백성’이라고 가르쳐 왔다. 이 책이 이야기하고 있는 것은 메소포타미아 팔레스타인 이집트 사이를 오가는 아브라함 이삭 야곱 요셉의 일족은 이 시대에는 소수파로, 거대한 도시 문명과 마르두크와 이슈타르의 성전을 세워 한 사람들 사이에서 새로운 '보이지 않는 신'을 계시된 부족이라는 것이다. 사회생활에서 아무것도 계약에 의하여 규정한다는 습관은 이 지역의 사람들에게 있어서의 기본적인 공통인식이다.
또 다른 주목해야 할 점은 야곱과 라반 모두 인간적인 친근함이 아니라 각각의 이익을 최대화하는 경제적 타산에 의해 경영상의 협력을 아끼지 않았다는 것이다.
라반의 저택에서도 밭에서도, 어떠한 다양한 일이나 희망에 넘치는 바쁜 것이 갑자기 시작되어 파고 두드리거나 경작하거나 굶주리는 소란이 시작된 것이다! 라반은 자금을 빌려 경영을 늘리고 거기에 필요한 구입을 했다. ···(라반은 마을의 금융업자로부터 자금을 융통해 주었다). 신규로 고용한 3명의 소사의 급료를 지불해, 그 3명을 먹이는 것만으로도 차입금이 필요했다. 그 세 명의 노예들은 마을에 살고 그런 임대를 하고 있는 남자 소유의 노예들로 야곱의 오더로 일을 했다. 야곱은 자신도 일을 도우면서 3명의 육체 노동만을 감독 겸 현장장으로 내다봤다. … 만은 생각하지 않았다. 오히려 중매상인, 자유로운 독립상인이라는 입장에서 거래를 진행하고, 현금으로 구입하는 경우에도, 관습의 물건 교환을 하는 경우도, 저속한, 교묘한, 허리가 낮은, 변설의 서, 사람 좋아하는 상인으로서 행동하고, 그때마다 언제나 자신의 어딘가에 많거나 적은 이초를 거두는 모든 것을 마음껏 하고 있었다. 그러므로 공식적으로 라반의 가축을 돌보는 전책을 맡게 되기 이전부터, 정말은 이미 조금만 자신의 가축으로서 양이나 염소의 무리를 소유하게 되어 있었다. … 리초를 낳는 일을 하지 않고 있어도 좋을까. 야곱은 그런 어리석은 일을 해치는 유혹에 빠진 적은 한 번도 없었다. 야곱이 라반을 속이고, 라반을 배신하고, 상전을 은밀히 뒤틀었다고 생각해서는 안 된다. 라반은 야곱의 카라쿠리노를 알고 있었다. 라반은 야곱이 하는 일의 명료한 개개인으로는, 구각을 늘어뜨리고 말 그대로 한쪽 눈을 찔렀다. 라반은 그렇게 하고 라반 자신이 그때까지 서투른 손으로 이익을 낸 것보다 거의 벌써 더 많은 이익에 붙어 있다는 것을 알고 있었고, 야곱을 두려워하고, 야곱의 일을 크게 보는 이유가 있었다 . ··· 야곱은 라반을 향해 이 점에 대해 조금도 사양하지 않고 확실히 경고했다.
"당신이, 주인, 당신의 일의 거래로 내 곳곳에 들어오는 겸손한 이초 중 하나에 눈을 감고, 그것을 급히 떼어내고, 당신의 소사들의 한 사람입니다. 일의 힘의 이익을 모두 네 곳에 넣지 않고 나를 하얀 눈으로 보게 되면 이 가슴 속의 영혼이 위로 되어 버리고 체내에 머무르고 있는 축복의 힘이 안 된다. 너의 일도 내 손으로 잘 되지 않을 것이다.··· 내 축복이 너에게도 도움이 되었고, 내가 너에게 빠져 나오지 않고 섬기는 것을 정말로 원한다면, 나에게 보상이 미소 지어진다. 나를 자위해주지 않으면 내 영혼은 움푹 들어가, 잠들어 버리고, 가지고 있는 축복이 당신을 위해 되어주지 않게 될 것입니다
. 라고 말했지만, 라반과 야곱과의 두 사람 사이에 그런 것이 두 번 3번 있었던 후에는, 라반은 아무것도 불평하지 말고, 야곱에게 하고 싶도록 시켜 두는 것을 선택했다.
오늘날의 흐름에 따르면 라반은 운이 좋은 자본가이며 야곱은 유능한 CEO라는 것이다. 공통이익을 위해 최대한 파이를 크게 하는 것과 내심은 어색할 정도로 속이고 자신의 몫을 극대화하려고 한다. 곤씨는, 이 중동인의 직계의 정신을 계승하고 있다고 생각된다.
‘우리와 난지’가 규정하는 책임의식
‘구약성경’에 그려진 이스라엘 사람들의 또 다른 특징은 하나님과 자신 사이에 상대적인 정신을 견지하고 있다는 것이다. 친척의 백부·조카의 관계에서도 자신을 양보하지 않지만, 그것이 하나님과의 관계에도 관여하고 있는 것 같다.
아브라함은 하나님 앞에서 생활을 계속하고 하나님의 객관적인 친근함을 느끼면서 영혼을 깨끗하게 하고 있었다. 하나님과 아브라함은 두 사람이었고, 우리와 헛소리였지만, 이 함정은 역시 '우리'라고 자칭하고, 다른 아브라함을 '난지'라고 불렀다. ··· 아브라함은 하나님 속에 흡수되어 버려, 하나님과 하나가 되어, 이제 아브라함이 아니게 되어 버리겠다고는 생각하지 않고, 하나님에 대해 매우 건강한 태도로 결연히 아브라함으로 계속되었다 ――하나님으로부터 엄청나게 떨어져 서 있던 것은 물론이고, 아브라함은 하나의 인간이었고, 흙에 불과했다. 그러나 아브라함은 하나님을 알게 됨으로써 하나님과 연결을 맺고 하나님이라는 숭고한 무지와 함께 존재함으로써 신성하게 되어 서 있었다. 그러한 기초 위에 서서 하나님은 아브라함과 계약을, 당사자의 어느 쪽에게도 약속에 맞춘 계약을 맺었다.
4명의 고객이 이것이 도움이 되었다고 생각합니다.
===
Goodreads Review
Joseph und seine Brüder #1-4
Joseph and His Brothers
Thomas Mann
,
John E. Woods
(translator)
4.42
1,873 ratings177 reviews
This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winner’s great masterpiece is a major literary event.
Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts–The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider–as a unified narrative, a “mythological novel” of Joseph’s fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humor, emotion, psychological insight, and epic grandeur.
Now the award-winning translator John E. Woods gives us a definitive new English version of Joseph and His Brothers that is worthy of Mann’s achievement, revealing the novel’s exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.
--front flap
1492 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1943
8,047 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Mann
1,337 books 3,954 followers
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate in 1929, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas,
noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual.
His analysis and critique of the European and German soul
used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.
His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952.
Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.
---
Exilliteratur - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
German Exilliteratur (German pronunciation: [ɛˈksiːl.lɪtəʁaˌtuːɐ̯], exile literature) is the name for works of German literature written in the German diaspora by refugee authors who fled from Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria, and the occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. These dissident writers, poets and artists, many of whom were of Jewish ancestry and/or held anti-Nazi beliefs, fled into exile in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and after Nazi Germany annexed Austria by the Anschluss in 1938, abolished the freedom of press, and started to prosecute authors and ban works.
---
Community Reviews
4.42
Vit Babenco
1,383 reviews
3,224 followers
Follow
May 1, 2022
Like father like son… Joseph is young but he is as smart and sly as his father…
One fine day he dreams a dream…
“And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they hated him yet the more.
And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed:
For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf.” Genesis 37:5-7
No one is a prophet in one’s own homeland…
Therefore, his brothers are indignant and disgusted… They punish Joseph and sell him as a slave into Egypt… And there smart and sly Joseph has his share of ups and downs…
One fine day Pharaoh dreams a dream…
“And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river.
And, behold, there came up out of the river seven well favoured kine and fatfleshed; and they fed in a meadow.
And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill favoured and leanfleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river.
And the ill favoured and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven well favoured and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.” Genesis 41:1-4
No one is a prophet in one’s own homeland…
Therefore, Pharaoh summons Joseph… And Joseph explains Pharaoh’s dream… Pharaoh magnanimously awards smart and sly Joseph divers favours… So Joseph enjoys wealth and glory…
It is cunning that allows one to rise above others.
180 likes
===
Fionnuala
772 reviews
March 7, 2022
Goodreads tells me I'm already 2 books behind schedule in this 3rd month of 2022.
Yes, this giant book of 600000 words scattered across 1500 pages took me 70 days to read, but alas it counts for only 1 book added to my shelves, so I'm going to be behind schedule for a while.
However, Joseph And his Brothers, written over a period of 17 years, was originally 4 separate books, so I could argue that I'm ahead of schedule by 2 books!
If I'm getting into the nitty gritty of the numbers, I have to question if it really took me 70 days to read 1500 pages? The truth is, I didn't read this book on every 1 of those 70 days. Goodreads tells me I read 6 other books in between, so the number of days I opened up the full-sewn cloth binding of this book, and peered at its cream-wove pages, covered in tiny Stempfel-Garamond typeface, is more like 40.
70? 40? For heaven's sake, what is this obsession with counting, I hear you mutter.
Well, reader (by the way, there must have been 100 mentions of the word 'well' in this book, and many of those were indeed 'by the way' as in 'by the wayside'), the narrator, who is recounting the events several 1000 years after the time of their happening, plays with numbers a lot, adding on here, subtracting there. Just between ourselves, he admits he does it in order to give coherence to the age-old stories he has chosen to draw into the light—in fact, he implies with a wink that he does it for heaven's sake!
You see, he is very chatty, this narrator, and he indulges in witty asides to the reader every now and then (sometimes about the challenge of rendering faithfully the 'then' in the 'now' (feeling he has to allow for our modern sensibilities, so to speak)).
It is as if he takes to himself the line he gives Joseph when answering Jacob's complaint that Joseph's clever words sometimes splash over the rocks of truth, by claiming wit is by nature a messenger who goes back and forth.
That example is more or less to say that I enjoyed the narrator's wit and was ready to follow along with his clever narrative games, even when they splashed the rocks of truth, as it were. And since the 'truth' word has been mentioned, I want to confess that I would not have made it through the narrator's 600000 words were it not for the playfulness with which he narrates the variations of repetition that occur within the stories in this book.
Even with the playfulness, it seemed to take me a century to get through the 1st 3rd of the book (not helped by reading 6 other books on the side), and it was a mystery as to whether I'd ever reach the end—so unbearable did I find the sight of the huge wedge of pages left to read (though they lay to the right). The narrator would chide me for using the word 'unbearable' lightly, so let's forget I said it and allow Time to take me (for it did, as seasoned readers know it always does) to page 620, where, after a long slow journey through the desert, the narrative reached the Nile, and Joseph boarded a ship called 'Sparkling with Speed'. The ship sailed south along the river, that is to say upstream, which often means travelling at a slow pace, but in that part of Egypt, the north wind is frequent so the boat truly did sparkle with speed as it descended further into Egypt. And the miracle is that my reading pace sparkled along with it! The longer I spent reading, the shorter it seemed, and the weight of pages listed to the left faster than I could ever have dreamed.
Before I knew it, well, on page 1168, to be exact, Joseph was standing before Pharaoh interpreting his famous dream about the fat and lean cows. Joseph forecast 7 years of plenty followed by 7 years of famine (or was that 5 fat years and 5 lean ones (but the narrator says let's not look too closely at those numbers)).
You might mutter that I've sped too swiftly through the pages between 620 and 1168, eg, the ones that traced how Joseph's story echoed older stories such as Gilgamesh courted by Ishtar, or Adam courted (indirectly) by the serpent, just as Jacob's life echoed older stories too, while of course both characters's stories foretold a significant later story most of you know very well—which more than justifies my abridgement, you'd have to accept.
So what did remain to be told in the slim right hand wedge of my book after page 1168—the final 332 pages, to be exact? Well, and it is particularly fitting to use that word now because those three hundred odd pages tell of how Joseph came face to face with the 10 brothers who threw him into the well by the wayside 25 years before (or was that 35?), and they also tell of Jacob descending into Egypt with his entire 'Israel' family, all 70 of them, though the narrator is unsure whether that number included Jacob himself, or if the women of the family were counted in the seventy, or what age Jacob was at the time, 90 or 100 or even 130, an indescribably old man in any case, who had to be carried all the way. And incidentally, the narrator uses the word 'indescribable' a lot, yet what amazed me was that I could see clearly everything he recounted in this long saga full of oppositions, light versus dark, the upper world versus the lower one, male versus female, smooth versus hairy, brother against brother, but also a story of brothers uniting, male traits merging with female, the lower world of Egypt rescuing the upper one of Israel, and darkness moving towards light.
Not to mention the pages of my book which finally moved from the right to the left.
140 likes
103 comments
======
Rod
102 reviews
58 followers
June 4, 2014
★★★★★★
What a truly amazing accomplishment this is, and as I say that it occurs to me that I am referring not just to Mann's writing it, but to my finishing reading it. 1492 pages + introductions, that's my high water mark, the biggest single book I've ever read by a considerable margin.
A daunting book, no doubt. It's also beautiful, erudite, enthralling, one of the best books I've read in my lifetime.
Okay, so this is one big damn book. Intimidating, right? A turgid Teutonic trudge through the second half of the book of Genesis, bloated to a gargantuan 1500 pages. One might think so, but luckily the pleasures contained therein are directly proportional to its immense size. This is Mann's masterpiece, not The Magic Mountain, estimable though that book is. Of course, I haven't read them all, merely this one, Magic Mountain, and Buddenbrooks, so how can I possibly make that determination? Simply because it is the God's honest truth. This is Mann in top form here, the necromancer breathing life into the lungs and infusing warm, red blood into the crusty, dusty stories of people who died long ago, assuming they ever existed (I'm not going to make that presumption). It's an historical novel and a novel of ideas (BIG ideas, perhaps the biggest), but at its heart it is a family drama, more Buddenbrooks than The Magic Mountain.
And what a family are these sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You either know the stories by heart or you don't. I didn't, at least not very well. I had fuzzy memories of childhood Sunday School classes, learning about Joseph's "coat of many colors" and Jacob's cheating his brother out of his inheritance, but really, I was just there for the cookies, inadequately sweetened Kool-Aid, and a short game of kickball outside, so a Biblical scholar I was not. However, I think unfamiliarity with the subject matter is actually a boon to your enjoyment of the book. Not that intimate Old Testament knowledge would necessarily be a detriment, because as Mann continually reminds the reader, everybody knows the story and how it ends, with the subtle implication of "Yes, but not told by me you haven't, so sit down, shut up, and enjoy." Those that are very devout may find that the text conflicts with their own personal dogma, so there could be trouble there. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, there are those that are repulsed by the very idea of reading something based on The Bible (ptooey!).
These two extremes may just be a lost cause. On the other hand, if you're like me and you just have some vague, half-remembered notions of messes of pottage and ladies turning into pillars of salt, you like historical novels, and you're interested in the myths and legends of ancient peoples of various creeds, you're probably right in the sweet spot.
This is a marvelous book that is going right to the tippy-top of my favorites list. It's so rich and engaging that as I reached the magnificent, very moving conclusion, I felt a profound sense of loss because I was leaving this world that I had felt a part of for so long. Until it gradually works it's way out of my system, I'm afraid Joseph and His Brothers is going to ruin other books for me for a little while. It's one of those books that I'll treasure the experience of forever. Read it! Read it, you fools!
113 likes
9 comments
===
Lee Klein
789 reviews
831 followers
Follow
November 2, 2022
A six-star masterpiece of authority, erudition, execution, insight, wisdom, relevance, characterization, and epic adventure. Move over, The Magic Mountain -- this one deserves your reputation and readership. Despite 1492 dense "Everyman's Library" pages, this one is much more engaging, moving, thematically hefty, and its incorporation of ancient history, mythology, and DETAIL more often boggles than numbs the mind.
There's an older translation with more biblical language, but this one by Woods flows like Tolstoy's take on a bit of the Old Testament. It's Mann, though: you can tell by the gentle irony, massive doses of description, ridiculous depth of knowledge, and of course the old man's authorial crush on his pretty boy proto-ubermensch, proto-Christ, super-Jew protagonist, Joseph.
The story as a whole suggests the story of Jesus, as well as the story of Osiris, but what I found more interesting was the subtle, intentionally ambiguous critique of Nazi Germany -- at times Joseph is the arrogant Aryan superman, at times his brothers are the brownshirts, at times Egypt is the aggressive expansionist empire.
Toward the end, the story suggests post-Depression-era New Deal programs and Soviet collectivism. Like all great lit, this one explicitly champions ambiguity.
Joseph is thrown into a well by his brothers -- a scene that rivals (maybe even surpasses) the one in The Magic Mountain when Hans is lost in the snow while skiing -- and sold into slavery, but it's all ultimately part of a playful "holy game" God plays on the brothers.
Beyond exceptional social, historical, and theological thematic stuff, Mann's storytelling skills are ridiculous. He's long-winded at times, sure. He says "in short" and then rips off a meaty summarizing paragraph. But he's so in control and does such an extraordinary job of orientating the reader I at least never felt lost, never wondered who was talking (I'm looking at you, Proust), always felt right there in the desert with soft-spoken Rueben with his column legs, cross-eyed Leah, Rachel with the beautiful eyes, little Benjamin, on and on.
So many characters, all of them with their reinforced distinguishing traits over several hundred pages. Very few women, most of them either idealized beautiful mother lovers or sultry and deceitful witch temptresses, but there are two freaking dwarves in this! DWARVES.
One even gets cudgeled by his master as things almost veer toward comedy. Especially toward the end, it's good clean fun when the narrator more often directly addresses the reader, but all along you feel Mann leading you through the story, in absolute control of its every aspect, including giving it air and life.
Considering that this extrapolates a few opaque lines in the bible into 1492 pages written over 16 years coinciding with the rise/fall of the Third Reich -- considering that this monumental novel about some of the earliest Jews was written while Mann's country exterminated six million of their mid-20th century vintage and tried to take over the world -- this might be a prime example of high-lit heroic insurgency.
At times it reads like he's raising a huge middle finger and directing it at his tragically misguided homeland. But it's more than that. There's wisdom, instruction, even a few moments of magic, and hope that it's all part of God's plan, even the worldwide horror of WWII. Anyway, towering literary artistry to the nth degree. Considering how long it takes to read this one, the $40 hardback is totally worth it -- plus it comes with one of those snazzy built-in bookmark ribbons.
88 likes
32 comments
===
Marc
3,030 reviews
1,023 followers
February 12, 2023
(re-editing of original review of 2015)
It took me three months to digest this gigantic work, 10 to 20 pages a day. So, inevitably notions like "monumental, epic, awesome" come to mind. Thomas Mann has developed the rather short Bible story about Isaac, Jacob and Joseph into 4 books, 1300 pages in total.
It’s the epic strength of the story and also the setting (especially ancient Egypt) that give this book its quality. Mann has written some really moving parts, most of all those about the interaction between Joseph and his father Jacob, and Jacob and his wife Rachel; and some parts were quite funny too, like Jacob becoming victim of his own cunning. In general, I was very impressed by the profile of Jacob, represented by Mann as a real patriarch. And also the theological framework (God expressing himself in the story of mankind, in mutual interdepence) was pretty much inspiring.
But Mann has put into the book some rather bizarre interpretations, as for instance the influence of Joseph on pharaoh Ikhnaton (suggesting that Joseph made him change his worship of the sun disc into something more monotheistic), and the Christological references (Joseph seeing his adventure in the pit and in the Egyptian prison as a kind of death and a prelude to resurrection); maybe it is just Mann’s way to add some irony, but to me the anachronisms were rather disagreeable. As lots of other readers I sometimes was exasperated by the very extensive way of writing and describing, with long, rather tiresome enumerations that add poorly to the story. Also Mann’s continuous toning down of his story (his own brand of irony?) is conflicting with the omniscient position of the author.
And then there is the character of Joseph; it took me a while to realize why I did not succeed in sympathizing with him (on the contrary). That was until Mann himself, around page 1000, characterized the actions of Joseph as rather arrogant, egocentric and without empathy. Mann adds we cannot but forgive Joseph because his actions are provoked by his certain belief he is blessed (by this father and by God), and destined, which makes everything he does and has to undergo into a part of a much broader, divine story. Well, at that point I knew: if I would come across Joseph in real life, I certainly would find him abhorrent and odious, like all people I meet that are 200% certain of their own convictions, their special part in history, no matter if it is on religious, philosophical, ideological or plainly materialistic grounds. Perhaps it's a kind of biblical irony when in the end not Joseph appears to be the chosen one, but the modest and sinful Juda.
I agree Mann has written a monumental work, but I cannot really sympathize with it, nor with his protagonist Joseph. I prefer the ever seeking, uncertain Hans Castorp of The Magic Mountain, still one of the most important books of the 20th Century!
64 likes
7 comments
===
Jimmy
511 reviews
689 followers
Follow
December 11, 2013
I don't think I've ever read 1500 pages this quickly. The remarkable thing is that it was so easy. The writing pulled me along with a combination of great storytelling, philosophy, history, psychology, humor, character study, politics--basically everything I love mixed together perfectly. At times it felt like an adventure story. At other times like reading the encyclopedia if the encyclopedia were fun to read. Still other times I was moved to tears, my heart aching for these characters and their plights. The pages flew by. And all these pages for what? For telling a story that took up a measly few chapters in Genesis, a story I already knew from bible study long ago (although my memory is hazy in many parts). That's the thing though. The way Mann tells it, it doesn't matter if you know the story or not because that's the point of a myth--that it exists outside of time, and therefore it recurs... and every time as if for the first time.
In this book, Mann was able to do justice to that idea of recurrence, because he was able to bring out the humanity in the characters behind the story so that for the first time I could clearly see the complex psychologies, the cultural, historical, and/or personal reasons behind all of the surface action. (Nevermind if those reasons may not be the real ones, nobody knows for sure, what matters is that everything made so much sense to my reality that I believed them completely at the moment of their telling). By making these people real, Mann also reveals layers of moral ambiguity that wasn't in the original. He introduces us to these characters and their situations anew, and adds the necessary complexity to muddy the waters of simple Good vs. Evil.
And I don't mean he just humanizes the main characters, but also the minor characters. Characters like Tamar and Mai-Sakhme (a character who doesn't even have a name in the Bible, but was simply called the "keeper of the prison"), which I do not remember hearing about in bible study probably because 1. they are racy / sexy / violent stories 2. because often these characters are complex in a way that doesn't fit in and therefore are inconvenient or 3. there was just no need to expand into the backgrounds of characters that do not matter in the bigger scheme of God's plans (although there is reason enough for us, and for Mann, because we are more interested in humanity than divinity). Sometimes they are powerful/clever women, or sometimes they are good people who just happened to not believe in the God of the Bible. They don't fit into the "myth" in the way that it is traditionally told. It was amusing when I went back to read the Bible's version of Tamar's story: "And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother." After reading Mann's version, I realized that that Bible passage is bending over backwards just to avoid giving the woman (Tamar) any agency. And because it's doing all these contortions, the logic of the story suffers; it makes no sense and never has (without seriously reading between the lines, which is what Mann does for us).
But Mann not only humanizes his characters, he also humanizes God. For isn't God the one character that Mann himself would relate to most, being afterall the God of this book? (That this God's name is Mann only makes it all the more delicious). By creating a world and breathing life into it with words, isn't he also implicated in this story as a co-author of these people's fates? So that humanizing God comes natural to him, and by plumbing into the depths of His psychology, Mann does Him justice, for His actions are often puzzling until you think of Him as faulty and therefore subject to analysis, scrutiny... even sympathy. Think of Him as motivated by a psychology no different than ours, by jealousies, insecurities, weaknesses, and self deceptions.
As you can see, Mann takes many liberties with these stories. Anyone with a fundamentalist faith in the literal truth of the Bible would probably have fits reading this. But we need not concern ourselves with those people, since those who only have faith in the literal word have no faith at all, seeing as God himself isn't literal but is the epitome of figurative truth, a divine metaphor if you will (note: this is just my opinion, not Mann's). Mann has no qualms about making up new characters (I'm pretty sure there were no midgets in the original version, but I'm glad they're here and by the way, those midgets?--though a bit more two dimensional than the other characters, they had me cracking up uncontrollably on many occasions), new situations, even correcting the Bible. He will often come right out and acknowledge that the Bible says one thing, but that what really happened was more fuzzy/hard to define clearly, and that it was streamlined over the years for certain understandable reasons.
I found the voice of this narrator, in his sobering adherence to logic and common sense, his knowledge of the different political situations at the time, the historical context, and the customs and people of that region, to be strangely comforting. I trusted him more because I was able to see who all the other gods were that other tribes at the time were worshipping and how this tied in politically to whatever larger systems were going on in the region. I felt secure in his all-knowing-ness, even though I too knew that this was a game, much like Joseph's Holy Game. No one is being tricked here, in this game of fiction, although we are all at the same time being tricked, willingly. For don't we all know that there is no possible way for Mann to know all these facts down to the minutest of details? But that is exactly what he provides for us. Instead of 7 years passed as some accounts would have it, Mann gives us page after page (and most of them quite entertaining) of years passing! And we drink it up. For the suspension of belief required in reading a novel is not that different from the one that inspires religious nutcases to mouth such delusions as "everything happens for a reason" and "God works in mysterious ways."
It is now time for me to go all apeshit on certain main themes of the book, and my theories on those themes. Here is where you should tune out before it's too late, if you don't care for this kind of stuff.
And here, to be sure, what we have to say flows into a mystery in which our own information gets lost--the mystery, that is, of an endless past in which every origin proves to be just an illusory stopping place, never the final goal of the journey, and its mystery is based on the fact that by its very nature the past is not a straight line, but a sphere. The line knows no mystery. Mystery lies in the sphere. But a sphere consists of complements and correspondences, a doubled half that closes to a unity; it consists of an upper and a lower, a heavenly and an earthly hemisphere in complement with one another as a whole, so that what is above is also below and whatever may happen in the earthly portion is repeated in the heavenly, the latter rediscovering itself in the former. This corresponding interchange of two halves that together build the whole of a closed sphere is analogous to another kind of objective change: rotation. The sphere rolls; that is the nature of the sphere. In an instant top is bottom and bottom top, if one may even speak in the generalities of bottom and top in such a case. It is not just that the heavenly and the earthly recognize themselves in each other, but thanks to spherical rotation the heavenly also turns into the earthly, the earthly into the heavenly, clearly revealing, indeed yielding the truth that gods can become human and that, on the other hand, human beings can become gods again.
To tell a story is to inevitably deal with the passage of time, either explicitly or implicitly. The best storytellers, in my opinion, do both at the same time.
I already mentioned the implicit bit a little earlier, how Mann has a, let's say, natural predisposition for piling detail on top of detail, but in such a fully realized world that it is almost never boring. What happens in those seven years is told in details, tangents, smaller inconsequential stories. But what matters is that the pages are there, as a placeholder for time passing. I felt the journey that Joseph made with the merchants that took seven times seventeen days (or thereabouts), I felt those long days viscerally as I read page after page before finally seeing the outskirts of Egypt on the horizon. I'm reminded of certain passages in Moby Dick that seemed to me to reflect time's "slabbiness" (my word) or even the section of 2666 with all the deaths (though nothing in this book even comes close to that type of exhausting-ness). The surprising thing is that even though those pages are there and its passage of time is registered in my consciousness, those pages were in no way fillers. They were entertaining and full of interesting tidbits so that the words almost leapt up to greet my eyes, to borrow a phrase from Eliezer.
As for the explicit mention of time... Musil had his pendulum, swinging from one extreme to the other with no stops in between. Mann's conception of time as a sphere is not that different. And the idea of time being cyclic in itself is not all that earth-shattering. What's interesting for me here is his blending of heaven and earth, of how Gods become human and humans become God (yes, there are many references to Jesus in this book, if you were wondering). One must also think of the storyteller's parallel mission--of making the mythic historic and the historic mythic.
Simply by choosing Jacob and Joseph's story, Mann deals with mythic time, by which I mean a story that exists outside of time, a timeless story, and one that necessarily repeats over and over like a motif with slight variations at each iteration. Mann makes us focus on a story which (we are continually reminded) is part of a much larger work, in which stories before and after it are echoed time and again... that this is necessarily a story in the middle of a story, as all stories should be, without beginning or end.
By creating a narrative echo chamber, he reminds us that these are not isolated events, but are part of a series that conform to a mythic template. Even his characters echo these stories to each other, for they are actors in this tradition and must know their roles. He echos things in the past (Abram, Noah) and in the future (Jesus) and by so doing implies that it doesn't matter which story we are telling because we are telling all the stories of the bible (as well as other mythic traditions) at the same time. It feels almost fractal in nature--you can zoom in or out as much as you like, you are still going to get the same general shape. The small story is echoed in the large story and vice versa.
But here the sphere turns and the mythic turns historic. Mann places the myth (which is timeless) in a very specific reality. To be sure, these stories were set in a specific time all along, but not with such detail to the facts of chronology, not with such painstaking concern for the illusion of verisimilitude. In a way, the original stories could have happened at any time. But Mann's insistence on taking these stories, which were previously in a vacuum, isolated to their own lessons only, and surrounding them in the sometimes inconvenient reality of culture, not just one culture but multiple cultures, clans, tribes, religions, sects, political groups, allows us to see that the things happening here are part of a much larger non homogenous real world, and other traditions/stories are happening in concert with what's central here, and each tradition sees itself as the center around which all others revolve.
At what point does flesh-and-blood become story, narrative, myth, and legend? And at what point does the sphere revolve yet again and from these mythic figures mere humans are spat out in all their complex and messy particularities?
germany
49 likes
23 comments
====
Erik Graff
4,989 reviews
·
1,088 followers
Follow
September 27, 2015
Having developed a taste for Thomas Mann and a hobby reading modern reworkings of biblical themes, I was quite pleased to obtain a copy of the tetrology, Joseph and His Brothers, during the last semester in college. I was even more pleased during the reading of it.
Mann wrote Joseph during the rise of Nazism in his homeland, finishing it during his North American exile. One wonders how much the political experiences of his life during this period influenced the book with its themes of rejection, exile and return.
One thing is certain. Mann did his homework. The biblical period covered by the narrative is Genesis 27-50. This becomes ca. 1420-1320 BCE by his calculation and his representation of the times in the Middle East and Egypt is quite plausible. His representation of the Hebrew mythical imagination and tradition, however, is outstanding. The stories of the patriarchs come alive in their retelling of a story within a story.
Mann considered Joseph and His Brothers his crowning achievement. I strongly agree.
literature
37 likes
3 comments
===
Aubrey
1,279 reviews
706 followers
December 9, 2015
4.5/5
For it is good, consoling, and useful that phrases of lamentation from the early days of beleaguered humanity are preserved and lie at the ready, suitable for later and present occasions as if made for them, in order to ease the pain of life to whatever extent words can ease it, so that one may make use of them and join one's suffering with ancient and ever-present pain.
I take religion seriously. My being an atheist doesn't mean I can't recognize the worth of belief's various forms, for when your brain tells you to kill yourself as often as mine does, the fact that history has countless communal mainstays of replenishment backed by ritual celebration and ethical paradigms with an eye on extending forevermore tells me many someones out there knew what they were doing. I do not believe in a higher power, but I was raised Catholic enough that I have the right to be married in one of the monotheism's churches if I so desire, and as a result I draw deeply from enculturated frameworks of appreciation for stained glass windows, choir music, and theological debate. Seeing as how a variation of my creed, a creed which in its older form took a number of centuries to say yes to the idea that my prescribed gender may indeed have souls, is being used as an excuse for forced public stripping and drone strikes, religious dialects are in my best interest.
We are easily moved to call some situation unbearable—it is the protest of fiercely outraged humanity, well intended and even beneficial for the person suffering. Yet such protest may easily also seem a bit ridiculous to someone whose reality is "unbearable."
The thing about this story that Mann stretched to nearly 1500 pages of epic is, it's about Jewish people. He wrote the first volume before fleeing Germany during the Antisemitism event of the century, so one would hope he had some sense of what it meant for him, someone who is not Jewish, to take up this Old Testament aka Torah aka what everyone thinks shitting on amounts as a clever critique of Christianity when really all you're doing is parading your bigotry story. It's not as simple as proclaiming the Bible is close to universal and so is fair game to anyone who has a mind to play off of it literature style. It's about this persecution of an ethnoreligious group of people who have been ghettoized and appropriated and filtered through tropes like witches and goblins literally for millenia. A good proportion of the world's non-Jewish population is familiar with the story of Joseph and his brothers, but does it know who it came from? Does it care?If you want the specifics of what passed by me as humanity and what paraded around as stereotype, see my updates.
He was not what is good, but what is all. And He was holy!
Reading this work is akin to stepping into a room full of conversation and having your attention caught by one particularly strident to the point of frolicking glee voice which is as busy generating material as it is contesting every previously brought up point in a history of arguments. I'm sure my MFA-believing prof would've keeled over at the hundreds of pages of introspection that made it quite clear that since everyone knows all the details about the journey it was going to enjoy taking its time thank you very much. Now, Mann's got a way with words and sentences and paragraphs and everything that probably immeasurably shaped my four year younger self's tastes when he got to me through The Magic Mountain. Four years later, that's what I was looking for, and in the first two volumes that mixed with a healthy dose of my beloved critically empathetic eye on spirituality at its very essence of continued existence is what I got. Later on, when the women and the black people showed up, that warbling voice filled up with pathetic excuses of tropes, and no further excuses of translation or intentional fallacy will give me back the time I wasted over poorly drawn characters, rape culture, and lazy essentialism.
The poor man would have to be able to do it, and it was just like God to pay so little regard to what humans imagine themselves capable of.
It's still Mann, though. There's a reason why he's still an absolute favorite. I still laughed and bawled and pondered my guts out. I'm still going to reread MM in less than ten years, and I'm likely to even pick up this behemoth again around the time I hit the aged range of Jacob's sons around his death bed. These days, if I'm going to read nearly 1500 pages written by a white man, each one better be a fucking fantastic page, and I'm not going to spare a single one out of some misbegotten goat of an idea that Mann can't take it. I'd want the entire corporate framework that makes a miniseries out of this be Jewish (take your conspiracy stereotype and shove it up your ass. Also, black Jewish people exist), but I still want it.
For a man who, contrary to all justice and reason, uses power simply because he has it—one can only laugh at him. If not today, then sometime in the future—and it is the future we shall hold to.
Those who want an unequivocal judgment of good, those who want an unequivocal judgment of bad: make do.
4-star
30 likes
11 comments
===
David M
440 reviews
393 followers
April 27, 2017
Symphonic ironies. I was not expecting that sudden Marxist digression in the last fifty pages. I guess he was Lukacs's favorite author for a reason.
Love & death, recognition & forgiveness. There's a lot here. May try and write out some thoughts about it later.
...
thoughts?
-In the underworld one finds only filth and gold...
This year (2017) I'm trying to hedge my bets for the apocalypse by reading both Marx and the Bible.
Among (many) other things, this gargantuan novel cycle is a meditation on the universal human capacity to become an instrument of god's self-awareness. After a good 1,500 pages, Mann leaves this becoming curiously arrested. With a little wink, the author hints that Joseph's triumph may also be its opposite. A beautiful homecoming in which he just happens to lead his people into the land of their enslavement.
Thus, I was a bit frustrated in my impatience to find direct insight into the end times, but then how could it be otherwise?
While I wouldn't necessarily call him a comic writer, Mann certainly is fond of winking. His prose may appear relatively conventional next to the likes of Joyce. Nonetheless, through the use of irony and the interplay of ideas he's able to create a dizzying labyrinth.
Not that it's a perfect. There were times reading it when I got hopelessly bogged down, all momentum grinding to a halt. I'd still say Magic Mountain is probably Mann's greatest novel. It's the one where he was most successful at wedding the demands of the novel with the philosophical essay, making ideas novelistic. Here, as well as in Dr. Faustus, ideas sometimes fits awkwardly with plot.
Even so, I do think Joseph and His Brothers is a book I'll be reading the rest of my life. Never going to really get to the bottom of it. The last hundred pages or so are truly something to behold. Without sacrificing any complexity, Mann is able to give an incredibly moving depiction of forgiveness.
28 likes
10 comments
Displaying 1 - 10 of 175 reviews
More reviews and ratings
_(Mus%C3%A9e_du_Caire)_(2076972086).jpg)
9.1 
.svg){kind=small}
.svg){kind=small}
