Joseph and His Brothers

Thomas Mann, “puts clothing on the myth” of the biblical story of Joseph in this deeply profound and moving novel that reveals aspects of the human condition: love, greed, ruthlessness, forgiveness, jealousy, and ambition. Joseph and His Brothers remains relevant to the 21st-century reader. If I had to choose one novel to take with me to read on an isolated island, this would be the one I chose.

Where historical fiction began for me. Even though I never finished these 1500 pages as a teenager, I set this book up as an idol, its invocations of an ancient style, its shivery atavism in habits of thought and behaviour. Yes, I owned the old Lowe-Porter translation with ‘thees’ and ‘thous’. Maybe that was bad for me. The new Woods translation grasps for Mann’s range: both archaic plunges and creative anachronisms, his bravery of style that leaves nothing off-limits. Epic, since Homer, is high and low, past and present – refuses to stick to any one register or observe the… show more.

This is my most favorite book. If I were shipwrecked on a desert island and could only take one book with me, Joseph and His Brothers would be that book. Taking the famous biblical tale as his inspiration, Thomas Mann creates a magnificently told epic story of cunning and deceit, true love, the careless vanity of youth, murderous sibling rivalry, fortuitous chance, human kindness, exclusion and imprisonment, seduction, destruction, power, fulfillment, and redemption.

I had begun reading Joseph and His Brothers shortly before my arrest and so it was that I read this book for the first time in the… show more.