18 October, 2001: Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
When I read a translation, I'm never quite sure how much to credit to the author. Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man has parts that are wildly funny, but most of the humor comes not from the dialogue or the situation but from the voice Mann gives to the young hustler, Felix. Felix has limited education (and, quite possibly, not so much upstairs), but boundless confidence, vanity, and self-satisfaction. Every paragraph drips with Felix's unearned sense of worth. But how much of this is Mann and how much is the translator, Denver Lindley? I have no idea, having never read any other Mann (I read this only because my father once mentioned enjoying The Magic Mountain and because I confused it with Melville's The Confidence-Man, which my college roommate spoke highly of). It just be cheap humor from a piece in a wicked piece of parody (Mann begun Felix Krull in the early years of the century and returned to it decades later, in 1954). I don't know, and given what I've heard about Mann's other work, I'm not sure that anything else he wrote is like this. But what it's good to see that a dour German (and a Nobel Prize winner, no less) cold occasionally cut loose with tremendously funny prose.