Klaus Mann's first novel, published when he was nineteen. His hero, Andreas, is a clever young man who leaves his provincial middle-class-intellectual father and his fiancée, a childhood friend and the daughter of a well-known artist herself, to pursue a career as a cabaret performer and look for beautiful young men in the night-clubs of Berlin. But, obviously, we needn't assume that there's anything remotely autobiographical going on here...

The story is fascinating for its very vivid first-hand descriptions of gay life in twenties Berlin, Hamburg and Paris, full of cabaret scenes, rent-boys, drag-queens, and even a sort of precursor of Anna Madrigal's boarding house with a cast of colourful eccentrics of all orientations. Plus a couple of bonus Zola set-pieces in the final chapters, an artists' ball and a dawn scene at Les Halles. Whilst there's no explicit description of sex-acts — presumably that would have been going too far even for Weimar censors — the encoding is so transparent that we can't really claim he's keeping anything from us. Not like Isherwood with his constant glances over the shoulder to respectability.

On the other hand, it's a bit harder to cope with the story of Andreas's psychological development, involving Walt Whitman singing the body electric whilst Andreas has peculiar dreams about rosary beads, angels and the Virgin Mary. This is all very first-novelish. There are clearly good ideas behind it: Mann seems to be talking about the collision between the abstract ideals of romantic love Andreas has grown up with and the breathtaking physicality of his desire for the lovely Niels. But the presentation of this somehow gets side-tracked into long-winded sentimentality. You can always skim lightly over the first few chapters and the last. There aren't so many 1920s gay novels that you can afford to toss one aside. ( )