NO CONFIDENCE
THE CONFESSIONS OF FELIX KRULL, CONFIDENCE MAN, by Thomas Mann; Secker and Warburg, English price 18/-. ERHAPS I came to Felix Krull a little jaded by the number of. eulogies I had read about it; but however I came, I found myself disappointed. What Professor Erich Heller calls "the great German comic novel" stops being comic just half-way through. { | Krull, the son of the bankrupt wine manufacturer, fighting his way up the social scale, is brilliant; as an ambitious liftboy he is superb... But Krull, the waiter by day, the smooth man-of-the-world by night, is merely amusing, and as the impostor-by-permission he verges on being dull. He’s too slick, too secure in his deceits. It’s perfectly plain that he’ll slip out of every jam with success, and as the danger of his being caught out dwindles, so does our interest. To give him credit, I don’t think Thomas Mann intended to do this to his readers. There are a couple of mentions of a period in jail (though where or for what reason we are not told) to suggest that the high road to deceit might not always have been smooth, but I think Mann, like his characters, yielded to the fascination of Krull the impostor and let him ride the high road unapprehended.
Peter
Cape
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19560824.2.26.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 890, 24 August 1956, Page 13
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218NO CONFIDENCE New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 890, 24 August 1956, Page 13
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