Confessions of Felix Krull

Confessions of Felix Krull is a novel by Thomas Mann published in 1954, though its gestation was long. Mann had been thinking about the character since 1905 and sketched the project around 1910 to 1913, when he still conceived it as a parody of Goethe's autobiography, Poetry and Truth. He drew inspiration from the memoirs of the Romanian con artist Georges Manolescu, and Mann's ironic aim was to show the passage from art to fraudulent deception, placing the artist in the neighbourhood of the impostor. A first version appeared in 1922 and 1923, and another in 1937; the part we know was completed between 1950 and 1954, but the story was left without continuation when the author died in 1955.

The novel presents itself as the memoirs of Felix Krull, a forty-year-old man who, now retired from his adventures, recounts his past while claiming to always tell the truth. Born in a village of the Rheingau around 1875 into a family of dubious solvency that produced sparkling wine, Felix grows up convinced that he belongs to a superior kind than his peers. From childhood he shows a remarkable gift for pretence: he feigns illnesses, forges his father's signature and presents himself to audiences as a child prodigy. After his family's ruin and his father's suicide, his world widens into the luxurious and marginal milieus of Frankfurt and Paris, where he works in a hotel and becomes involved with women from different social positions.

The work is a caricature of the Bildungsroman and of the memoir, and moves within the tradition of the adventure novel and the picaresque. Its central theme is the relationship between art and deception: the protagonist understands acting, seduction and charm as ways of leading an audience to sustain an illusion. It has been received as a light and ambiguous work, often read as an ironic reflection on identity, appearance and bourgeois morality.