Transparency of Being

YOUNG JOSEPH -- Thomas Mann -- Knopf ($2.50).

When Author Thomas Mann, some ten years ago, began to write his version of the ancient tale of Joseph, he did not expect to find in its archaic simplicity such profound implications as he soon began to discover. The story of Joseph in the Bible takes 13 chapters; to cover the same ground Author Mann has already used up two full-length volumes, will need one more. But, as readers of the first installment know (TIME, June 11, Joseph And His Brothers is not simply an expanded retelling of the Bible tale. In the 50-odd close-written pages that prefaced his work Author Mann stated his thesis: the story of Joseph, like all very old stories, is a kind of shorthand condensation of legends that point back & back to an era before history, a human dawn unguessed by Science. "Very deep is the well of the past. . . ."

Such a deep-diving narrative is no job for the ordinary novelist, but Thomas Mann, artist, mystic and philosopher, is no ordinary writer. Readers will find in Young Joseph the same magical blend of imaginative artistry and philosophic intuition that made Joseph And His Brothers a blue-moon book.

Author Mann discovers in Joseph a mystic who, like all his long line, was conscious of "the transparency of being, the characteristic recurrence of the prototype." This is the theme, unpopular in an individualistic day, which opens up like a never-ending vista from Author Mann's pages. As a mere tour de force, in revivifying the fossilized record of a universally familiar legend. Young Joseph would be a masterpiece, but it is far more than a clever conjuring trick. In this installment, which covers only a few years of Joseph's life, leaves him. at the point where he is sold to the Ishmaelites and carried to Egypt, Author Mann's deceptively quiet method gathers in whole eons of human history. Says Mann: "It is seldom indeed that beauty and wisdom are combined upon this earth." Last week readers of Young Joseph were lucky enough to find that rare combination.

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