Esther Leslie is a lecturer in English and humanities at Birkbeck College, London. One of her ten top novels and stories by philosophers, as shared at the Guardian:Doctor Faustus by Thomas MannRead about another entry on the list.
Languishing under a hot sun in “German California”, Mann and Theodor Adorno worked together on this vast novel. This narrative about barbarity and rationality features a composer who is something like Arnold Schoenberg. The work of the fictional, demonic, syphilitic composer Adrian Leverkuhn are described in lines from Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. Adorno himself makes an appearance as the devil, in the shape of a “theoretician and critic, who himself composes, so far as thinking allows him”.
--Marshal Zeringue
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