Klaus and Other Stories (Vagabond): No. 5

Klaus and Other Stories (Vagabond): No. 5

by Allan Massie (Author), Allan Massie (Author)

Synopsis

Klaus, the core work in this collection, is a a novella that recounts the last days of Klaus Mann's life, while referring back to the trials of the Mann family (Klaus being Thomas Mann's son) and Klaus's own autobiographical novel, Mephisto, one of his better known works partly because it was banned in West Germany for decades for its portrayal of his ex-lover Gustaf Grundgens, before being turned into an Academy Award-winning film. Massie's novella attempts to unlock Klaus's relationship with his father, his former lover and his art. Klaus is an appropriate follow-on from Surviving (Vagabond Voices, 2009) in that writing is a major theme. With his usual thoroughness disguised by concision and a masterly light touch, Massie sets about examining how human relatinoships and artistic endeavour interact, and this book also goes back to those public themes that dominate so much of his other works of fiction set in the twentieth century. The novella alone would make this collection worthy of note, but the short stories will also fascinate the many who know Massie's work and admire it. They come from his long writing career and have been published under one cover for the first time. Klaus and two other stories has just been written, while there are others from the nineties, the eighties and even the seventies.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Vagabond Voices
Published: 13 Aug 2010

ISBN 10: 0956056067
ISBN 13: 9780956056061

Author Bio
Allan Massie is the author of twenty novels and a dozen non-fiction books. His six novels about the Roman Empire have been widely translated, and have been particularly successful in Brazil. Gore Vidal has defined him as a master of the long-ago historical novel . His twentieth century novels have been compared by French critics to Balzac and Stendhal, by Muriel Spark to Thomas Mann, and by others to Evelyn Waugh. He thinks such comparisons as pleasing as they are ridiculously exaggerated. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and has been given an honorary doctorate by Strathclyde University.