Arnold schoenberg

Saturday

Philip Hensher

What lists of our greatest novels get wrong

“Where are all my favorite parts?” Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica symphony. “Oh, there they are. In the tiny notes.” The tendency of many people, presented with the overwhelming abundance of an art form, is to exclude as much as possible. Reduce the wonderful life of incidental invention to the tiny notes; erect walls excluding the fascinating curiosity, the eccentric, the madly idiosyncratic. Produce a list of the 100 Best Books, sticking to declared Greatness. People have been producing lists of the Best Books for a hell of a long time. When copyright law was reformed in 1774, it enabled publishers to produce collections of novels for the first time.

novels

Thursday

Michael Arditti

The secret life of Thomas Mann: The Magician, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed

From our UK edition

In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to provide her with a British passport, wrote: ‘Who’s the most boring German writer? My father-in-law.’ This is clearly not a sentiment shared by Colm Tóibín, who has brought out a fictionalised biography of the Nobel prize-winning novelist. Unlike The Master, Tóibín’s 2004 novel about Henry James, which confined itself to a four-year period when the protagonist was in his mid-fifties, The Magician covers almost the whole of Mann’s life, from his boyhood in Lübeck, which inspired his first and arguably finest novel, Buddenbrooks, to his death in Zurich at the age of 80.