Customer Reviews

The Holy Sinner

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You don't have to plow through monster works like "The Magic Mountain" or "Buddenbrooks" to gain an appreciation for the art of Thomas Mann. "The Holy Sinner" is a short novel (for Mann) about the medieval legend of St. Gregory. This is a story of sin and redemption, with the horrors of the sins, incest and unbridled lust, making the redemption all the more spectacular.

The style is elegant, stylishly mocking the medieval archaic German which is well-rendered into a stylized antique English by the talented Mrs. Lowe. The story is as gripping as any soap opera but the artistry with which it is told is exquisite. As usual, Mann blends his story-telling ability with his genius as a writer of ideas. I can hardly think of another writer who comes close to being able to combine a good yarn with incredible style and deep concepts (maybe Melville and Nabokov, perhaps.)

This is a good preparatory book for "Joseph and his Brothers"--a monumental book about the biblical story of Joseph in Egypt.

"The Holy Sinner," on a literal level is a story about a multi-generational incestuous family, and their reconcilliation of their sins. Read as such, "The Holy Sinner" is a disturbing account with a semi-satirical take on the religious rituals of redemption, incest, nepotism and penance.

On a deeper level, "The Holy Sinner" comes forth as a contemporary myth. There is a definite straining in this book for a sense of redemption, forgiveness, and the search for meaning. Ripe with symbolism, and exploring a kind of "less-violent" Oedipal storyline, you can feel Mann's struggle over the contemporary situation in Germany in the late 40s and early 50s.

Though not what I would call a "sequel" to "Doctor Faustus," in the allegorical way you can catch a glimpse of Germany in the pages of "The Holy Sinner," I would nevertheless point out that the theme of "penance and change instead of murder and vengeance" seems very contemporarily bound.

However, the story itself hinges on one coincidence too many, and there are passages that nearly grind to a halt in speed and direction. I did come away from the novel with a new respect for Thomas Mann, but this was not an easy read, and, at times, not even enjoyable. The alliteration and sometimes near-poetry of the writing was in some passages immaculate, and then a few pages later almost clumsy and awkward.

I would consider this book one meant more for study than outright enjoyment, though I did enjoy it more often than I didn't. It was work to finish it, however, and more work to digest and attempt to understand it. If you are in the mood for something serious and allegorical, pick up "The Holy Sinner." But if you're looking for something lighter or entertaining, I'd suggest you pass this one by.

These lines are, for me, among the most powerful I've ever read:

[The pope-elect has been found on his little rock in the middle of a lake, where he exiled himself.]

"'Ah, holy lord," she sobbed, "I merit not your remembrance or your praise, for God knows my sin. When I protected you that day from the fisher's harsh words, he taxed me with wantonness and fleshly feeling for you and I denied the charge, falsely, as I now confess. For my eyes did really have to do with your limbs in the beggar's rags and with your noble features, and wantonness was at the bottom of the good I did you, depraved lost soul that I am!'
'That is a small matter," answered Gregorius, "and not worth talking about. Seldom is one wholly wrong in pointing out the sinful in the good, but God graciously looks at the good deed even though its root is in fleshliness. Absolvo te.' These were his words. It was the first instance of the extraordinary clemency he was to display as Pope, so consoling to all men and only offensive to the draconians."

There's nothing more important to me, to you, to any of us, than attaining this understanding. We all get it too late.

Of all the literature that I know, only Adalbert Stifter expresses this idea with more transparency, and yet, I have to admit that Mann's work has much greater scope than Stifter's. Mann's conception in this book and in others has the devil in it. (I'm not saying he's a satanist, but that his stuff is Faustian.) Stifter was much more careful. He had to be, in his careful age.

In Goethe, Novalis, Stifter, others, and here in Mann, this theme is treated in various ways-- our civilization is built on a natural foundation that is beyond good and evil, and sex is natural, and likewise beyond good and evil. That our values get their initial impulse from something as dubious as sex is something we all have to come to terms with.

The bible makes this point nicely too, but I don't know that book well enough to comment. German literature after Goethe seeks to reconcile the pantheistic focus on nature with Christian values. This process begins with Goethe's famous quote, ""In natural science, we are pantheists; in poetry, polytheists; morally, monotheists".

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of the great German writers of the 20th century. His best works rely on an exquisite sense of irony, erudition and multiple layers of meaning to explore some of the burning moral issues of our time. "The Holy Sinner" is one of his last works and was written immediately after what many consider his masterpiece, "Doctor Faustus".

In "The Holy Sinner" Mann retells a medieval legend about the life of Pope Gregory in plush,tongue-in-cheek, bejewelled language reminiscent of knightly chronicles. The translator, H. T. Lowe-Porter, has done an excellent job in translating the romance-like pastiches spoken or written by the different characters --in particular if you have a smattering of French, Latin, Spanish, Catalan, Middle English or Provenzal, you will enjoy these light-hearted and occasional romps. However, as is usual with Mann, the glittering surface-story is not the most interesting one. This book is also a Christianized version of Sophocles' Oedipus tragedies and an optimistic commentary on the possibilties of European reconstruction in the aftermath of the second world war.

Unfortunately I feel the three levels do not resonate with the power you find in his masterpieces ("The Magical Mountain", "Doctor Faustus"). Russell Berman, who wrote the introduction to the book does not agree: "In the Holy Sinner, Thomas Mann unfolds an ornate depiction of the Middle Ages, replete with courtly love and jousting knights, illiterate peasants and papal magnificence. This fascinating setting, which the author embellishes with all his linguistic and confabulatory powers, is equally a backdrop for weighty matters of the mind: religious questions of sin and grace, psychoanalytical inquiries into incestous desire, political investigations into the distribution of power."

If you have never read Thomas Mann, I would recommend you start with his novelette "Death in Venice&quo! t; and then go on to "Doctor Faustus" and "The Magic Mountain". If you have read his masterpieces be warned: this is, in Graham Greene's nomenclature, more of an entertainment than a novel.

I have read several reviews on Amazon saying that this novel, which appears to be a simple retelling of a 12th-century verse epic about the life of Pope Gregory, is actually fraught with deep meaning and symbolism. The rationale for this argument seems to be that Thomas Mann, steeped as he was in Freud, Nietzsche, Goethe and other philosophers, was incapable of writing anything simple. Therefore, "The Holy Sinner" must be a multi-layered, allegorical commentary on post-WWII Germany and the modern concept of evil. While reading this book, I searched high and low for deep meaning, but didn't find much. There is one obvious Oedipal reference (a son sleeps with his mother), a narrator with a sardonic sense of humor, and a sinner who spends 17 years as a penitent (maybe the number 17 is symbolically significant?), but none of this adds up to "an optimistic commentary on the possibilities of European reconstruction in the aftermath of the second world war," as one of the Amazon reviewers put it. If anything, Mann is exploring culturally unacceptable sexual urges, as he did in "Death in Venice," and the idea that the diseased soul is sometimes capable of the greatest good. Overall, however, "The Holy Sinner" strikes me as a simple retelling of a 12th-century verse epic about the life of Pope Gregory. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

You don't have to be able to appreciate the spoof on medieval literature and traditions and all that (I know almost nothing of the genre) to go nuts over this book. You do have to exercise a bit of patience after that ringing first chapter, to accustom yourself to the difficult diction and exotic words with bunched-up consonants, but if you do, you'll soon learn that this is very far from some stuffy intellectual's conceit; it's a rip-roaring story that makes you gasp, laugh, and fight yourself not to rush through in order to find out what happens next.

Two highpoints: the first chapter not only with its exultant language, but with that wry, wise, hilarious voice, and the chapter called The Penance, an impossibly rich, word-perfect description of time passing and a sort of time-lapse description of Grigorss' physical change that beats to hell, and always will beat to hell, anything you'll see all too literally depicted at the movies.

Fantastic story of transformation and forgiveness.Mann uses the pen like a master.