A retired lawyer arrives in Paris carrying the ruins of a professional life: a company built over decades, dissolved by a partner’s fraud; a marriage ended; a reputation requiring reconstruction. He takes an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, watches the cranes restore Notre-Dame, and begins to ask a question he cannot escape: why do people trade their souls?The Faustian bargain is not a medieval myth. It is a structure — a recurring architecture of seduction in which something irreplaceable is exchanged for something immediately, powerfully desired, whose cost is always higher than the transaction can sustain. The offer is always genuine. The calibration is always precise. The signing is always incremental. And the irreversibility is always the last thing discovered.
Faust Today follows his year-long inquiry through the French Revolution and the Terror, through Weimar Germany and the philosophers and filmmakers who signed their collective bargain with the Reich, and through Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus — the novel that answered the question most completely from a house in California while the extermination camps’ horrors were starting to be discovered. Moving between intimate memoir and historical analysis, the novel maps the Faustian transaction at every scale — from a single man’s ruined company to an entire civilization’s catastrophic surrender — and asks what survives when the bargain expires.
The answer, arrived at slowly and honestly, is the one that has always been available: the desk, the pen, the page, the continuation