Klaus - Softcover

Massie, Allan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190825128X ISBN 13: 9781908251282

Publisher: Vagabond Voices, 2014

Synopsis

Klaus is a novella that recounts the last days of Klaus Mann's life. It unlocks his relationship with both his father and his former lover, Gustaf, who was a communist before collaborating with the Nazi regime and becoming one of its most celebrated actors. On his return to Germany after the war, Klaus was outraged to see that Gustaf had now switched seamlessly to the post-war regime, and was once more the darling of the theatre world. Klaus, who had been isolated as both a homosexual and an anti-fascist, felt that Germans or rather those Germans in prominent positions were refusing to acknowledge their culpability. His isolation was now complete.

About this title

About the Author:

Allan Massie, one of Scotland's foremost literary figures, was born in Singapore in 1938, grew up in Aberdeenshire and read history at Cambridge. He has published 23 works of fiction and nine of non-fiction, which include a string of highly successful historical novels. Perhaps his most masterly works are those set in contemporary society, which confront a wide range of difficult moral problems: The Death of Men, A Question of Loyalties (winner of the 1989 Saltire Society Book of the Year Award), Shadows of Empire, Surviving and, of course, The Sins of the Father. He is also one of Scotland's most respected political commentators and a prolific journalist whose book reviews always reflect his deep understanding of the art of writing.

Review:

Allan Massie is a master storyteller, with a particular gift for evoking the vanishing world of the European man of letters. His poignant novella about Klaus Mann bears comparison with his subject's best work. --Scottish Review of Books

Not well known here, award-winning Scottish author/commentator Massie effectively portrays a man on the edge while revealing the devastation beyond. After World War II, Thomas Mann s son Klaus returns to Germany from America, where his family has lived in self-imposed exile. Klaus, ever a struggling writer, has maintained a furtive homosexual life, claiming that coming out would hurt his anti-Nazi activism. Looking about Germany, he says repeatedly, You can t go home anymore, acknowledging that the world has changed forever. Drugs and rent boys keep the pain at bay. VERDICT Fluid, understated, and precise; a telling portrait of a man in ruins. --Library Journal

This novella vividly re-creates the days and hours leading up to Klaus Mann's death by overdose and in so doing makes known to the public the inner life and struggles of a writer on the brink. --World Literature Today

About this edition

• Publisher: Vagabond Voices
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 190825128X
• ISBN 13: 9781908251282
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152