tsenteme's review against another edition
5.0
Με αυτό το βιβλίο ολοκλήρωσα όλα τα μεγαλύτερα σε όγκο, αλλά και ποιότητα έργα του Τόμας Μαν, μαζί με το μαγικό βουνό, τους Μπούντενμπροκ και τον δόκτωρ Φάουστους. Κάθε του έργο έχει ιδιαίτερη αξία, και ξεχωρίζει ως προς κάθε άλλο. Ο Ιωσήφ και οι αδελφοί αυτού, είναι το μεγαλύτερο σε έκταση, γεγονός που θα μπορούσε να το κάνει βαρετό και δυσπρόσιτο, κάτι που όμως δεν συμβαίνει.
Πρόκειται για την ιστορία του Ιωσήφ, ξεκινώντας από τον πατέρα του Ιακώβ, τον μύθο δηλαδή που περιλαμβάνεται στην παλαιά διαθήκη. Γιατί όμως να έχει ενδιαφέρον κάτι τέτοιο; Ο σκοπός του δεν είναι να αλοιώσει την ιστορία για λόγους αιρετικούς, όπως μας έχει συνηθίσει ο Σαραμάγκου. Αφηγείται με τον δικό του μοναδικό τρόπο την ιστορία, όσο το δυνατόν μένοντας στην "αυθεντική" ιστορία, χρησιμοποιώντας την σαν μέσο για να περάσει τη φιλοσοφία του, όπως δηλαδή στο μαγικό βουνό, αλλά με πολύ διαφορετικό τρόπο.
Η αφήγηση του είναι αριστουργηματική και σεμινάριο για το πως η πλοκή ενός μυθιστορήματος είναι το α και το ω. Πάνω στην πλοκή βασίζεται λοιπόν για να φτάσει σ' αυτό το εξαιρετικό αποτέλεσμα. Μία κοιλιά κάνει μόνο στον τρίτο τόμο, όπου περιγράφει τα πρώτα χρόνια του Ιωσήφ στην Αίγυπτο, στον οίκο του Πετεφρή. Το βιβλίο αυτό διαβάζεται πολύ ευχάριστα και ανεξαρτήτως θρησκευτικών πεποιθήσεων.
Πρόκειται για την ιστορία του Ιωσήφ, ξεκινώντας από τον πατέρα του Ιακώβ, τον μύθο δηλαδή που περιλαμβάνεται στην παλαιά διαθήκη. Γιατί όμως να έχει ενδιαφέρον κάτι τέτοιο; Ο σκοπός του δεν είναι να αλοιώσει την ιστορία για λόγους αιρετικούς, όπως μας έχει συνηθίσει ο Σαραμάγκου. Αφηγείται με τον δικό του μοναδικό τρόπο την ιστορία, όσο το δυνατόν μένοντας στην "αυθεντική" ιστορία, χρησιμοποιώντας την σαν μέσο για να περάσει τη φιλοσοφία του, όπως δηλαδή στο μαγικό βουνό, αλλά με πολύ διαφορετικό τρόπο.
Η αφήγηση του είναι αριστουργηματική και σεμινάριο για το πως η πλοκή ενός μυθιστορήματος είναι το α και το ω. Πάνω στην πλοκή βασίζεται λοιπόν για να φτάσει σ' αυτό το εξαιρετικό αποτέλεσμα. Μία κοιλιά κάνει μόνο στον τρίτο τόμο, όπου περιγράφει τα πρώτα χρόνια του Ιωσήφ στην Αίγυπτο, στον οίκο του Πετεφρή. Το βιβλίο αυτό διαβάζεται πολύ ευχάριστα και ανεξαρτήτως θρησκευτικών πεποιθήσεων.
anabey's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
bookkeeper_steve's review against another edition
3.0
Took me seven years to finish. Didn't even get to the final book he wrote in America. I'm calling it quits. "Joseph in Egypt" has all the action, the other books are about his journey and Dad. The prequels don't add much except grief. There was supposed to be a subtle commentary against Nazism that I may have missed. Be warned most of the dialogue involves people in unsavory slavery and comments toward dwarfism.
rancuceanu's review against another edition
5.0
Rounded up from 4.5 - is Mann's best novel. His usual style, long sentences and digressions, and all characters tending to speak like philosophers, rather than in a language appropriate for their time and status, makes me retain 0.5 stars.
lectoribenevolo's review against another edition
4.0
I read it. The whole thing.
Review to come after I read Mann’s 1942 address to the Library of Congress about this book.
Review to come after I read Mann’s 1942 address to the Library of Congress about this book.
justbill82's review against another edition
4.0
FINALLY. Really mixed feelings here. This book is insanely bloated, and if you don't love the idea of 600 pages of third person exposition on early 20th century views on Egyptian and Biblical history and Mann's own concepts of theology, this would be exhausting. I sort-of like that stuff, but it certainly can be trying at times.
That said, the actual events of the story are really well handled, and Mann hooks you and teases you with events you know are coming in a masterful style. If anything he assumes you know the story inside and out and uses that as the lure to get to the next step of the tale. The book shines at moments of importance in the biblical story, and the translator really gives us some beautiful prose. It is a colossal book, and the fact that I kept reading shows he "had me", but this was not as good as Buddenbrooks.
That said, the actual events of the story are really well handled, and Mann hooks you and teases you with events you know are coming in a masterful style. If anything he assumes you know the story inside and out and uses that as the lure to get to the next step of the tale. The book shines at moments of importance in the biblical story, and the translator really gives us some beautiful prose. It is a colossal book, and the fact that I kept reading shows he "had me", but this was not as good as Buddenbrooks.
jimmylorunning's review against another edition
5.0
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.
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?
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?
sherbertwells's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
A 1500-page retelling of the biblical story with added religious, sociological and psychological insights. While I appreciated Mann’s cosmopolitan world, I don’t think he fully succeeds in humanizing the characters that inhabit it.
“Is there no stopping in the plunge to the bottomlessness of the well? Of course there is. Not much deeper than three thousand years down—and what is that compared to the fathomless depths?” (40)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Slavery
Moderate: Sexual assault, Sexual content, Religious bigotry, Violence, Ableism, and Death of parent
Minor: Homophobia, Racism, and Pregnancy
brynhammond's review against another edition
5.0
The first two parts were cult material for me and put this book up alongside Dostoyevsky and Moby Dick in my five most significant. Less so once in Egypt. I imagine that is partly me: my mind was ignited by little chapters such as 'The Red One' and 'The Primordial Bleating' where, for want of a way to phrase this, we get positively atavistic; Egypt became more of a conventional historical novel, and besides, I myself loved the tent life, the sheep and wells, and the archaic portions of the Bible -- not smooth civilized Egypt. I was under twenty and never had the stamina to finish. Last year I flipped through the second half and honest to God was not impressed.
I read the H.T. Lowe-Porter and lapped up the biblical style but thought Mann grew increasingly diffuse, to less purpose as we dwell in Egypt. From this review http://www.newrepublic.com/article/flesh-and-myth (translation notes near the end) I see the diffuseness may not be Mann's. Shall have to go back to this with the John E. Woods translation.
I read the H.T. Lowe-Porter and lapped up the biblical style but thought Mann grew increasingly diffuse, to less purpose as we dwell in Egypt. From this review http://www.newrepublic.com/article/flesh-and-myth (translation notes near the end) I see the diffuseness may not be Mann's. Shall have to go back to this with the John E. Woods translation.
More...