An unconventional read, as only it could have been done

House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles

ON a surface level, House of Exile can be read as an attempt to understand the writer, satirist and radical, Heinrich Mann.

Mann was a complex and often contradictory type, driven by art yet driven too by a kind of lust for the colours and majesty of life. But dig a little deeper and this book becomes a study of exile’s effect on the artist, a contemplation on the sort of freedoms and confines that might possibly fuel or inhibit the art, and of the place and importance of love in the entire heady mix.