Joseph in Egypt

Joseph and His Brothers, Book 3

De: Thomas Mann

Narrado por: Mark Elstob

In this third volume of Thomas Mann’s monumental retelling of the biblical story, Joseph in Egypt follows Joseph after he is sold by his jealous brothers to Ishmaelite traders.

They bring him to Egypt, where he’s eventually purchased by Potiphar. Joseph's intelligence, charisma, and integrity soon earn him Potiphar’s trust, and he rises to become the overseer of Potiphar’s household.

However, trouble arises when Potiphar’s wife, becomes infatuated with Joseph. After he repeatedly rejects her advances, she falsely accuses him of attempting to seduce her. As a result, Joseph is imprisoned.

The novel delves deeply into themes of fate, identity, divine providence, and the blending of mythologies—particularly Egyptian and Hebrew—as Joseph's story moves toward his ultimate rise to power.

©1936 Thomas Mann (P)1936 W. F. Howes Ltd

Joseph and his Brothers. Joseph in Egypt.

This is a very interesting story. The first two volumes were outstanding as is this third volume. I have preordered the fourth and final volume, and look forward to its release on Dec 18. I have really enjoyed the narrator’s performance. The amount of knowledge the author commands in constructing this immense novel is impressive. I feel like I have taken a trip through the Holy Land and ancient Egyptian. I have read many “great” works of literature, and this is up there with the best of them. Highly recommended if you have the time. The story moves along at a nice pace, and I never felt bogged down or bored.

Wordy

Sometimes its better to say less and mean more. In this insufferably wordy novel, Thomas Mann offers endless metaphysical speculation on the gods of the Near East as Jungian archetypes. To do this, he uses his human characters as mere masks for the gods. Though he engages in elaborate physical description of their bodies, their clothes, their habits, his characters do not come across as real people, only as occasions for the metaphysics of the Jungian unconsciousness. The metaphysics are wonderfully explained in the introduction to Book 1 of this four volume tome. In fact, that essay is the best part of the whole work. The story of Joseph and his brothers only serves as a hollow mask where the eternally recurring themes of the archetypal gods play out in history - and in words. At least for this reader, Mann's fifteen hundred pages of prose do not add, but rather detract, from the humble economy, and profound silence, of the original Biblical text.