Bashan and I

Thomas Mann is not a writer to skim over the surface of things. In Bashan and I he devotes 247 pages -- admittedly with wide margins and large typeface in my 1924 Henry Holt edition -- to describing his dog. Anyone who is a dog person will feel a pang of recognition when Mann describes the behaviors of Bashan and draws connections between human and animal emotions. But as revealing as the book is about a dog, it is just as useful as an example of Mann's technique of deep, deep detail. He even explains himself in two spots. "But I am moved to add further details to this transcript of Bashan's character, so that the willing reader may see it in the nth degree of vivid verisimilitude," and later, "I am attached to this stretch of landscape and grateful to it, and so I have described it with something of the meticulosity with which the old Dutch masters painted." As to the reason for selecting the Hebrew Bashan to replace the dog's original name, Lux, Mann devotes not one syllable.