(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winner's great masterpiece is a major literary event. Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four partsThe Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provideras a unified narrative, a "mythological novel" of Joseph's fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humor, emotion, psychological insight, and epic grandeur. Now the award-winning translator John E. Woods gives us a definitive new English version ofJoseph and His Brothersthat is worthy of Mann's achievement, revealing the novel's exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1924 The Magic Mountain was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus (first published in the United States in 1948). Thomas Mann died in 1955.

Between 1926 and 1942, Thomas Mann labored off and on for a total of ten years at what he called his "pyramid," Joseph and His Brothers, the great literary monument that he hoped would tower over all the other works for which he is now remembered. It is half a century now since Mann's death, and although The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, "Death in Venice," and Buddenbrooks still find their readers, a mere five decades have apparently sufficed to raze the pyramid of Joseph, leaving few traces of what Mann intended as his magnum opus. Why? For starters, there is the book's publishing history Germany's history. The first volume, The Stories of Jacob, appeared in October 1933. The Nazis had spent their first nine months tightening the terror, Thomas Mann and his family were already in exile, and there were few who dared express open approval of the book. Despite mounting difficulties, S. Fischer Verlag managed to publish a small edition of volume 2, Young Joseph, in April of the following year. By 1936, however, S. Fischer had already been forced to move to Vienna, where Joseph in Egypt was published. The Nazis allowed the work to be sold inside the Reich, but permitted no reviews and engaged in bureaucratic chicaneries to make sure it did not sell. Joseph the Provider appeared, then, in neutral Stockholm, in 1943. After the war, modest editions were offered once or twice a decade, the first in 1948, but the work never recovered from its shaky early years. The sheer bulk of the thing surely worked against it as well: four formidable volumes, a veritable encyclopedia of ancient Near Eastern myth, history, theology, and cultural anthropologyand all just to retell a (once) familiar Bible story? And who in postwar Germany would read it? Many Christians found it heterodox to the point of heresy; any Jewish readership had been largely exterminated in the death camps. Communists in the East had no use for a "religious" Thomas Mann. Intellectuals in the West were not particularly keen on "biblical" novels, either. Besides, in 1947 Mann's Doctor Faustus had become the focus of interest for Mann's readers. It spoke directly to the evil that had befallen Germany and the world. Joseph seemed more remote than ever. On this side of the Atlantic, the book's reception, if seldom enthusiastic, was somewhat warmerMann was living, after all, among us as the representative of the "good Germany," and volume 4, Joseph the Provider, was written under the California sun. A single-volume edition incorporating all four novels was first published in 1948 and remained in print into the 1990s. But over the years, the larger American reading public, accustomed to historical biblical novels in the Ben-Hur and Silver Chalice mode, has quite understandably viewed Joseph as forbiddingly Germanic. And more intrepid readers, who find an intellectual home in The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus, have been just as reluctant as their European counterparts to embrace a work that seems so far removed from the concerns of our time. Beyond the issue of subject matter, there is another difficulty. However unfairly, Americans have tended to think of Mann as a writer of turgid and dense, if not almost unreadable prose. And here are almost fifteen hundred pages that, in Helen Lowe-Porter's translation, can often read rather like the King James Bible run amokreplete with "he saith" and "thou knowest." Joseph and His Brothers deserves a far better fate. It is, by my lights, an epic comedy of extraordinary grandeur. If Thomas Mann regarded it as his magnum opus, that was in part be