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By Their Epithets Shall Ye Know Them

In response to Paul Claudel’s dictum—‘fear of the adjective is the beginning of style’—a defence of adjectival extravagance, mobilizing Nabokov and Mann, Joseph Roth and Herta Müller, to showcase the literary power of the epithet, and its ability to alchemize the noun.

Teddy and Tommy: The Masks of Doctor Faustus

The one-sided love story of Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann and its comedy of errors, as the philosopher wooed, counselled and was misused or rebuffed by the novelist. What was Adorno’s exact role in the genesis of Doctor Faustus, while the two shared an Angeleno exile? Why did they never meet again after the war? Who was the real original of Adrian Leverkühn?

The Sins of Padua

Deciphering the puzzle of Proust’s second visit to Italy, through a chimera of desire in his fiction: from chambermaid to valet, through tell-tale slips of idiom and signature tricks of speech.

In Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Thomas Mann

What deadly secrets (boys apart) did Thomas Mann have to hide? The Auguste Dupin of German letters follows a trail of bloody knives, howling dogs and unbidden confessions from Buddenbrooks and ‘Tonio Kröger’ to Doktor Faustus and Felix Krull.

Deadly Potions: Kleist and Wagner

Could there have been a link between Kleist’s suicide and Wagner’s Liebestod? Michael Maar’s bravura exploration of the ties of life and art that bound the composer to the writer—sexual and lethal passions in the same retort.

The Ordeals of Fire and Water

Reflections on the difference between reading a novel for the first and for the second time. Proust, Mann, Joyce, Kafka—how do they stand the two tests of a fervent discovery and a cool deconstruction, and what is the relationship between the two?