Books like Doctor Faustus
A German biographer writes during the Reich's collapse about his friend, a composer who contracted for twenty-four years of genius in a Leipzig brothel.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Doctor Faustus
Jean-Christophe
The life of Jean-Christophe Krafft, born into a family of musicians in a small Rhineland town, from his childhood and first loves to his struggle as a composer in Germany and Paris.
Herscht 07769
Florian Herscht, a gentle giant in a small town in Thuringia, writes letter after letter to Angela Merkel warning her of the end of the universe, while the neo-Nazis around him have other plans.
Gertrude
Kuhn, a composer lamed by a sledding accident in his youth, tells of his friendship with the wild opera singer Muoth and their love for the same woman, Gertrude.
The Magic Mountain
A young man arrives at an Alpine sanatorium for a three-week visit and stays seven years, as the intellectual debates among the patients mirror Europe's slide towards World War I.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
A nameless railway clerk resists corruption in post-independence Ghana.
The Unconsoled
A concert pianist arrives at a European hotel for a performance and discovers that the building, the city, and his schedule are shifting according to a dream logic he can't control.
Mario and the Magician
On holiday at an Italian seaside resort in the late 1920s, a German family goes to the show of Cipolla, a hunchbacked hypnotist who bends his audience to his will.
The Lost Steps
A New York musicologist travels up the Orinoco looking for primitive instruments and finds a village that has unlearned time, and then has to decide whether to come back.
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Riobaldo, an old rancher, tells a visitor about his years as a hired gunman in the backlands of Brazil, his pact with the devil and his love for his comrade Diadorim.
Seeing
The sequel to Blindness: the city holds an election where every ballot is cast blank, and the government's response reveals that democracy's greatest threat is its own defenders.
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
On the day of his eightieth birthday in 1958, the architect Heinrich Faehmel and his son and grandson, three generations of a Cologne family, look back on fifty years of Germany.
The Piano Teacher
Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory nearing forty, lives with her controlling mother, and when a young student, Walter Klemmer, pursues her, she sets out her own terms.