Michael Maar is an acute analyst and elegant stylist. He has brought out how disturbed and disturbing a writer Thomas Mann can appear again when read with such close and ingenious attention.
- T.J. Reed, Times Literary Supplement
Germany's most gifted literary critic of the younger generation.
- Perry Anderson, London Review of Books
Maar is a fine literary sleuth.
- John Banville, Man Booker Prize Winner 2005,
Michael Maar mounts a devastating forensic challenge to this consensus: Mann was remarkably open about his sexual orientation, which he saw as no reason for guilt. But sexuality in Mann's work is inextricably bound up with an eruption of violence. Maar pursues this trail through Mann's writings and traces its origins back to Mann's second visit to Italy, during which the Devil appeared to him in Palestrina. Something happened to the twenty-one-year-old Thomas Mann in Naples that marked him for life with a burdensome sense of guilt...but what exactly was it?