I took a double take when this video appeared. You look exactly like my dad, who passed away last year. You are eerily similar. He even wore the same style glasses and hat.
I appreciated Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks when I read them years ago, but never read this one. A lengthy retelling of an Old Testament story didn't sound compelling to me. But Mann is a master; perhaps I should put it on the list.
I thought so too. But -man- Mann(!) is it his best book!!! That first sentence and the whole introduction is a grandiose lesson about time, history and lore. And then you'll fall in love with Joseph, I guarantee (like everyone in the book itself, besides his brothers, of course)! Now I only have "Charlotte in Weimar" left and I'm jealous of everyone who can still discover his work. I'm German, by the way, and consider myself lucky that I can enjoy what he did with our mother tongue. No other author played with language like him.
@@hape3862 you make a good case, and yes that first sentence was brilliant. For me, Magic Mountain (only read in English, alas) is the height of novel-writing outside Dostoevsky (and in another way entirely, Nabokov).
@@GreenTeaViewer Ha, you liked Dostoevsky's Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the Idiot? And of course you liked Alyosha from the Brothers Karamazov? Then you'll LOVE Mann's Joseph! OMG: I forgot to ask if you've read Mann's "Doctor Faustus"? It's set in my home village (Polling in Upper Bavaria, called Pfeiffering in the book), where the Mann family spent their vacations! (And where his sister committed suicide, by the way.) - He wrote it decades later during his exile in the US, and what he remembered and described in his book is still there exactly as it is in the book. And as if there weren't enough coincidences, I now live one block away from the house where his mother and brother lived for a few years in Augsburg, hehe.
@@hape3862 yes, I have read Doctor Faustus...another that I will have to revisit. Anyway, I have located a copy of Joseph and his Brothers so I'll be reading it soon. And may I recommend to you the works of Sándor Márai such as "Embers". Like Mann, he wrote about the dissolution of early 20C civilisation from a Central European perspective.
