Death in Venice and Other Tales

Fabian

Rating: really liked it
It's fantastic to be completely swayed by century-old works; to be turned- on completely by some German dude who probably thought so differently from you that anything he produced is just receptive to awe alone, & no discernible connections between you and the author exist. Not true. If you saw the dreadful film "A Single Man" (or read the novel) & thought that the idea for that was elsewhere inscribed, well, you were super right! It is this masterpiece by Thomas Mann it tries to emulate; an excursion to a Venice that with ironic signs of pestilence & death still invites in the ideas of love & artistic inspiration.

Aschenbach, the fictional writer that was likely based on Mann himself, takes a trip and takes us there with him. When the omnipresent narrator gets inside of Aschenbach's head, then describes in utter beauty the ugliness of the scene & the main character's bittersweet, & altogether human experience in the old world, we have a forerunner to Patricia Highsmith's beloved "The Talented Mr. Ripley" & a brother to Hawthorne's "The Marble Faun," another Italian adventure with pah-lenty of gay sensibility.

poncho

Rating: really liked it

"What do you mean, Diotima,' I said, 'is love then evil and foul?' 'Hush,' she cried; 'must that be foul which is not fair?' 'Certainly,' I said. 'And is that which is not wise, ignorant? do you not see that there is a mean between wisdom and ignorance?' 'And what may that be?' I said. 'Right opinion,' she replied."
— Plato. The Symposium (trans. by Benjamin Jowett).

Fuzzy Logic is a paradigm often applied to Artificial Intelligence, though its applications may vary. It’s a kind of logic that was introduced in order to contrast boolean logic, wherein a variable’s value is strictly either 0 or 1. Therefore, in fuzzy logic a variable may fall in the range between 0 and 1, showing a more accurate approach on how, in the real world, things are (or at least should be). For example: according to some, a 400 page book may be mildly long, but for others, it may be slightly long, whereas for someone else it may be short. We classify things this way, in fuzzy logic, not just as either black or white, big or small, zero or one, right or wrong — and not even completely heterosexual or completely homosexual, in regards to sexuality. Thus, it shouldn’t be a scandal that a straight man feels attraction towards another man (age aside), like it happened to Thomas Mann in 1911 when he took a trip to Venice where he met Władzio: a boy who inspired the writer’s subject of beauty, his Phaedrus, his god, his literary inspiration and fascination. Whereas Mann wasn’t actually as absorbed as to stalking the boy throughout the Piazza di San Marco, he certainly was compelled by him, according to his wife. So one may say that this did happen. On the other hand, bringing back my introductory efforts to state that emotions aren’t ruled by boolean logic, Death in Venice is often regarded as a beautiful approach to queer literature — beautiful as we scarcely find in great classics — even though the author thereof isn’t exactly queer.

Mann transferred his experience in Venice to Gustav von Aschenbach, a 50(-ish) year-old writer and widower, who after an opening scene decides to take a trip to clear his mind in order for his work to bloom again. The aforementioned opening scene is that of a mysterious man in a cemetery and Aschenbach’s lugubrious omen and sudden decision to go to Venice; and from this point on one falls under a sort of sombre ambience and an ill spell that won’t leave the reader until the final paragraph. Many things happen, delightfully described, but as for the main thread, at his arrival at the hotel, and more precisely, at supper, Aschenbach meets Tadzio, a young boy who catches his attention immediately and its then when the plot begins to unravel into a deadly and dreadful ending. Mann keeps symbolisms constant and fate also plays an important part, as when he intends to leave Venice due to health issues, his luggage keeps him from doing so. He also makes allusions to greek mythology, especially Plato’s Symposium, relating Aschenbach and Tadzio to Socrates and Phaedrus in a reverie of sorts and exposing the greek philosopher’s ideas of beauty, love and the god thereof — that is Eros, who resides in the loving rather than the beloved. Also, Mann, in my opinion, tried to un-taboo the love between two men whose ages are disproportionate using Socrates’s ideal of love and to remark that there’s nothing despicable about the beauty of the senses that resides in youth drawn to the kind of beauty that is rather spiritual and resides in maturity — that love as we know it is rather fuzzy than boolean, and it is always beautiful and somewhat artistic. The dark side of it lies in the abuse and the excess of this passion, when it becomes dangerous not only to oneself but also to the beloved, having both well-beings at risk, like Aschenbach did keeping the truth about Venice to himself, in a frenzy and feverish delusion that his love for Tadzio was still pure.

"Nothing is more bizarre, more ticklish, than a relationship between two people who know each other only with their eyes—who encounter, observe each other daily, even hourly, never greeting, never speaking, constrained by convention or by caprice to keep acting the indifferent strangers. They experience discomfort and overwrought curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatis-fied, unnaturally stifled need to recognize and to exchange, and they especially feel something like a tense mutual esteem. For people love and honor someone so long as they cannot judge him, and yearning is a product of defective knowledge."

Death in Venice is doubtless an incredible masterpiece, not only because of its lyrical and delightful prose and because it challenges the reader to bring the barriers of taboo down, but also because of this sense of personal approach that makes a great work great: that is, the writer’s ability to touch and kindle our souls — like Mann himself wrote:

"But even on a personal level, art is, after all, a more sublime life. It delights more deeply, it consumes more swiftly. It carves the traces of imaginary, intellectual adventures into the features of its servant."

The rest of the stories are magnificent as well — not as engrossing as the Venice but still worth reading in order to appreciate how most of their characters share the same artistic, obsessive and solitary nature of Aschenbach; like Tonio Kröger: a literate young man who struggles with life in the arena of literature; or Spinell, a lonesome writer in a sanatorium, found in Tristan, the novella that would later develop into The Magic Mountain. Overall, there’s bleakness in Mann’s world, but then again, there is always beauty to be found in the bleak.

Thomas Mann captivated me literarily but also personally, (view spoiler)[and part of me died with Aschenbach in his efforts to reach beauty (hide spoiler)], taking my memories and experiences as nourishment. In dust I became and I shall float by the ill weather of Mann’s Venice, eternally tracing beauty and love, to which, I think, I’ll eventually approach by the way of literature.

"Never had he felt the pleasure of words more sweetly, never had he knowm so deeply that Eros is in words as in the dangerously delicious hours when he sat at his crude table under the aiming, with his idol in full view, the music of that voice in his ears: he was modeling his little essay on Tadzio’s beauty, forming that page and a half of exquisite prose whose purity, nobility, and quivering emotional tension would shortly gain the admiration of many."

David

Rating: really liked it

I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it. You artists call me a commoner, and commoners feel tempted to arrest me ... I do not know which wounds me more bitterly. Commoners are stupid; but you worshippers of beauty who call me phlegmatic and without yearning, ought to reflect that there is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of common-placeness.

IT'S SO HARD TO BE AN ARTIST, YOU GUYS!

I have heard Thomas Mann described as this towering literary genius, a monumental figure of German literature. So I was kind of looking forward to Death in Venice and other stories as a sampler before maybe I try one of his novels. Well, his short stories have killed that desire stone cold dead.

I won't deny he's great with language. He slowly, painstakingly, verbosely paints the inner and outer lives and pained souls of all these lugubrious connoisseurs of truth and beauty, who are all just so woeful and tormented and woe! woe! woe! But each and every story was slooooooow and went basically nowhere. It's like staring at a painting. And staring. And staring. And staring. The first few minutes, yeah, it's beautiful, and I suppose if you are a true lover of fine arts you can probably stare at it for hours and be entranced, but I would like to move on and look at something else.

The most interesting part of this collection was the translator's notes on how difficult it was to render Thomas Mann's elegiac German into elegiac English. The linguistic structures of German, which Mann makes proficient, masterful use of, are different enough from English that translation requires nearly as much artistry as that possessed by the original writer. A straightforward idiomatic translation simply won't capture Mann's use of language.

Unfortunately, for a bunch of racy tales about incest and pedophilia, Mann managed to bore me out of my mind and also make me squirm at what a creeper he is. The title story, Death in Venice, is about an old writer who becomes so infatuated with a young boy that he stalks the kid all over Venice while moping about how unbearably beautiful the boy is.

Yes, there are lots and lots of allusions and metaphors. Death in Venice is a protracted exercise in literary allusions, as are Sieglinde and Siegmund in The Blood of the Walsungs.

She kissed him on his closed eyelids; he kissed her on her throat, beneath the lace she wore. They kissed each other's hands. They loved each other with all the sweetness of the senses, each for the other's spoilt and costly well-being and delicious fragrance. They breathed it in, this fragrance, with languid and voluptuous abandon, like self-centred invalids, consoling themselves for the loss of hope. They forgot themselves in caresses, which took the upper hand, passing over the tumult of passion, dying away into sobbing...

Aww, that's so sweet and kind of steamy.

And by the way, they're brother and sister.

So, from the incestuous Sieglinde and Siegmund to the tormented, angsty, artist Tonio Kröger to the doomed writer Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice, there are an awful lot of whiners and people who are either having inappropriate sex or wallowing in misery thinking about people they want to have inappropriate sex with. This is stroke fiction for tormented German intellectuals. I really wanted to like these stories because as I said, Thomas Mann is supposed to be great but... ugh.

This collection included the following stories, of which only a couple left an impression on me and the rest kind of passed over me as I sank into a glazed stupor:


The Will for Happiness
Tristan
Little Herr Friedemann
Tobias Mindernickel
Little Lizzy
Gladius Dei
The Starvelings: A Study
The Wunderkind
Harsh Hours
Tonio Kröger
The Blood of the Walsungs
Death in Venice


Okay, go ahead and tell me I'm an uncultured peasant. It's not like I'm some short-attention-span teenager who can't stand literary fiction. But I'm starting to think I just don't like German literature. I still need to give Hermann Hesse one more shot, and maybe, maybe, I will try one of Thomas Mann's novels. But not any time soon. I am giving this 2 stars, which I'm sure is a crime against the Aesir, but even though I normally rate books based on a combination of how well I enjoyed them and how well-written I think they are — and Mann is a great writer, I can see that — 3 stars would mean that I didn't find the experience completely unenjoyable, and frankly, I was dying to be done with this.

James Catt

Rating: really liked it
I just finished reading this marvelous book of short stories. My favorite among them was "Little Herr Freidman", a sad tale of a mans peace of mind turned on its head by desire.

Richard Derus

Rating: really liked it
The Book Report: I feel a complete fool providing a plot précis for this canonical work. Gustav von Ascherbach, literary lion in his sixties, wanders about his home town of Munich while struggling with a recalcitrant new story. His chance encounter with a weirdo, though no words are exchanged between them, ignites in Herr von Ascherbach the need to get out of town, to get himself to the delicious fleshpots of the South. An abortive stay in Illyria (now Bosnia or Montenegro or Croatia, no knowing which since we're not given much to go on) leads him to make his second journey to Venice. Arriving in the sin capital of the early modern world, and even in the early 20th century possessed of a louche reputation, brings him into contact with two life-changing things: A beautiful teenaged boy, and cholera. I think the title fills you in on the rest.

My Review: I know this was written in 1911-1912, and is therefore to be judged by the standards of another era, but I am bone-weary of stories featuring men whose love for other males brings them to disaster and death. This is the story that started me on that path of dislike. Von Ascherbach realizes he's in love for the first time in his pinched, narrow life, and it's with a 14-year-old boy; his response is to make himself ridiculous, following the kid around, staying in his Venetian Garden of Eros despite knowing for sure there's a cholera epidemic, despite being warned of the dangers of staying, despite smelling decay and death and miasmic uccchiness all around, because he's in love. But with the wrong kind of person...a male. Therefore Mann makes him pay the ultimate price, he loses his life because he gives in and falls hopelessly, stupidly in love. With a male. Mann makes his judgment of this moral turpitude even more explicit by making it a chaste, though to modern eyes not unrequited, love between an old man and a boy. Explicit references to Classical culture aside, the entire atmosphere of the novel is quite evidently designed to point up the absurdity and the impossibility of such a love being rewarding or rewarded. It's not in the least mysterious what Mann's after: Denial, denial, denial! It's your only salvation, faggots! Deny yourself, don't let yourself feel anything rather than feel *that*!

This book offends my sensibilities. Gorgeously built images and sonorously elegant sentences earn it all of its points.

Barbara

Rating: really liked it
When I was in college, I read Death in Venice for the first time. I can't imagine what I made of it then. Of course, the story of an older man drawn to a beautiful young boy is compelling, but the sense of time running out can't have meant much to me at that point in my life. I read the novella again recently and was struck by its power. Mann captures so effectively the emptiness of Von Aschenbach's life. Though the story is full of people, he is apart, alone, a writer, a recorder of life, not a participant. His growing infatuation with Tadzio threatens his safe world, but his desire for contact with the boy overwhelms everything else.

Here is part of how Mann describes Tadzio when Von Aschenbach seems him for the second time. "It was the head of Eros, with the yellowish bloom of Parian marble, with fine serious brows, and dusky clustering ringlets standing out in soft plenteousness over temples and ears." In the beginning, he is a statue, something beautiful to admire.

Yet at the end of the book, Mann writes, "Once more he paused to look: with a sudden recollection, or by an impulse, he turned from the waist up, in an exquisite movement, one hand resting on his hip, and looked over his shoulder at the shore. The watcher sat just as he had sat that time in the lobby of the hotel when first the twilit grey eyes met his own. . . It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner smiled at him and beckoned"

Patrick.G.P

Rating: really liked it
The short stories of Thomas Mann often revolve around troubled society families and struggling artists. His depictions of the toils and troubles of artistic and sensitive people can read as the author himself longed for a less complicated relationship with the world around him. His artists yearn to belong more deeply to the society around them, and as in Tonio Krôger looks at society and people from the outside, always feeling somewhat removed from humanity. His characters are deeply sketched, and their inner workings are laid bare in a startling manner without ever drawing any conclusions from them.

Mann’s prose is deep, colorful and masterly, showing people who struggle with emotions, and their place within a family and society, often tragic and at times even funny. One of the tales that resonated heavily with me was Tristan, the beautiful young woman admitted to an asylum with lung disease and the strange writer who falls for her. Here as in other stories, Mann commands a firm grasp over myths and classical literature, both using them as powerful allegories but also substituting their original meaning in a playful manner.

Death in Venice stands as a masterpiece of the collection, the complex inner workings of the protagonist, the intense descriptions of the awkward feelings towards the young boy, together with masterly use of allusions and metaphor combine to create one of the most striking short stories of the collection. Art, intellect, old age, love and how we deal with these issues, either meeting them head-on or creating illusions to ourselves and those around us. These are the central themes of the novella, and Mann’s dense and beautifully evocative prose is pure joy to read, creating a pervasive sense of gloom through the story, both in its protagonist and the diseased city around him.

Thomas Mann’s stories are wonderful and thought-provoking, demanding the reader’s attention and digestion as he concerns himself with perhaps, the core part of our humanity, our longing to belong, to create and to love and how we often never find a concrete answer to these problems. These short stories are highly recommended, and I am already preparing a further dive into Mann’s bibliography.

Josh Friedlander

Rating: really liked it
I got this collection primarily for Death in Venice - during a trip to Venice, how cliché ! - but I read the others first, and I think they set it up well. Having previously read Mann's bloated monster The Magic Mountain, I wasn't quite sure how to place him. Reading this, with some input from the helpful German-lang. Wikipedia, gave me some valuable background.

"It is as well" Mann writes in Death in Venice, "that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not its origins." But that is disingenuous, because many of Mann's stories very obviously reflect his own life. The archetypal Mann hero is the shy, awkward romantic from a respected but dull Hanseatic trading family, who yearns for true love, the warm South, and literary greatness. Writing mainly in the first half of the 20th c., Mann was aware of this trope as somewhat dusty, and usually plays it skew, or sometimes outright for laughs. Also, Mann wrote about perverse sex - lusting after young boys (totally based on his life)! twincest (based on his wife Katia's)! Perhaps not unusually for people who had seen the Weimar bohemia evaporate and fled the Nazis into exile, several members of the Mann family (many of whom were writers) took their own lives.

A quick breakdown of the plots of these stories/novellas:

-The Will for Happiness is a short story about an old, sick man who loves a young woman
-Tristan - mini-Magic Mountain. A Tristan and Isolde story in a sanatorium. But mildy satirical.
-Little Herr Friedmann is a crippled but otherwise successful man who thinks he can live without love, then falls in love (revealing Ibsen's idea of the Lebenslüge) - it doesn't end well
-Gladius Dei - a Savonarola-type zealot rails against art
-Tobias Mindernickel - a satire of the idea of the angry reclusive old guy with a heart of gold. (If animal abuse makes you squeamish, maybe give this one a miss!)
-Little Lizzy - a man prepares an "artsy" version of a pop song. It ends badly.
-The Starvelings - self-pitying artist type feels whiny
-Harsh Hour - the artist sees himself in the (disguised) body of Schiller, struggling to write but still banging it out in the end.
-The Wunderkind - comic story about, well, a wunderkind.
-Tonio Kröger - for me the Platonic Mann story. A writer grows up lonely, becomes famous in the South, heads back to his hometown and doesn't like it much
-The Blood of the Walsungs - two self-hating half-Jewish twins hook up(!)
-Death in Venice - in contrast to Tonio Kröger, a man heads from the dull North to Venice, lusts after a Polish kid, and....well, I don't want to spoil it, but read the title carefully.

I think one generally becomes a better reader as one grows older, because the elements of time and place in each story start to blur, and one remembers the recurrent parts. Mann's characters, wimpy, pale and overmannered, might seem a little ridiculous, but the path they take in trying to achieve friendship, fame and meaning in life, recur in age after age.

Schmacko

Rating: really liked it
I know, it’s a crying shame I haven’t read this classic years ago. And now, having read it, I can say, “What a fascinating, disturbing little melodrama, ” set this brief but dense book aside, and then never pick it up again.

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann was published in 1912. It’s about Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful septuagenarian German author who leaves his very staid, regimental life for a whim-filled holiday in Venice. While there, Aschenbach slowly shrugs off his straightjacket existence and starts to feel fiery passion. This is brought on by another vacationer to the island – a 14-year-old Polish boy named Tadzio.

Death in Venice is about what 70-year-old Aschenbach’s passion means. Is it an artist’s appreciation of physical beauty? Is it the sickly old author longing after his own youth, acknowledging that that Tadzio takes youth for granted, not even realizing that his beauty is fleeting. Is Aschenbach a pedophile? Is his unnatural lust brought on by Aschenbach’s previously restrictive existence?

Mann does a beautiful job of balancing all these complicated questions in a story that is both prosaic and tense. The book veers from being a confessional of sickness to an uncomfortable apologist creed for pedophilia as an education for the youth and an appreciation of physical beauty by older men.

I happen to be a strong believer in social structure and propriety on this given subject, so I found myself a little squeamish, even the though the book itself is otherwise chaste. I was frustrated by Mann’s ability to both vilify the emotion and then create a shaky logic for why it exists. In that sense, the book is very successful.

In another sense, this book is pure 1912 melodrama. A horrible plague has befallen Venice, a mysterious malady that becomes a major plot point. Aschenbach plummets from his formerly logical and lofty moral values into an obsessed and passion-controlled wisp of a thing. Achenbach is erudite enough that he goes into long narratives about the history of man-boy love and its acceptance in other cultures. You can feel the German trying to justify his own increasingly senseless emotions as he grows both physically and mentally sicker. Finally, it’s blindingly clear that the mystery disease and Achenbach’s lust are parallel metaphors, in which Mann gives his final judgment on the overarching subject of the book – the appreciating of youthful beauty versus pedophilic lust.

I get it. I read it. I can move on.

Siria

Rating: really liked it
I'm ambivalent about this one. Perhaps it was the translation I was reading (I think I have the actual Der Tod in Venedig in the house somewhere, but frankly I couldn't face literary German at the moment), but I never really felt at ease when reading this. Not because of any of the themes that Mann tackled, or because of the denseness of the work; they were challenging and thought-provoking aspects, of course, but I found myself able to grapple with them.

What unnerved me was the way in which all the protagonists seemed to be so utterly detached from society, while at the same time being so changed, so warped, so created by its conventions. I suppose this is in part because Mann was so heavily influenced by Nietzche, and I have really never liked Nietzche. There was no part of me which felt able to connect to the characters. Von Aschenbach in 'Death in Venice' left me unmoved; the eponymous Tonio Kroger did manage to move me, but only to the extent that I wanted to smack him over the head for his pretentiousness.

When it comes down to style and elegance and observation, I can certainly appreciate Mann's achievement. I just can't like him as a writer.

Onur

Rating: really liked it
The selected story of Thomas Mann.
Thomas Mann uses words very well. Friedemann is a withdrawn small boy, strange Tobias, story of the Qualen's fantastic wardrobe, strange Piepsam and daydreamer Spinell, importance of feels on the human at Tristan story, A lonely man Tonio Kroger's journey in Europa and Scandinavia, A wonderful pianist boy story, one train incident story, A story of Mario and magic man Cipolla's show in Terre di Venere in Italy, an eluded woman; feeling changes belong a woman and good relation between one mom one daughter. I like too much.

James Henderson

Rating: really liked it
Tristan

Richard Wagner saw the premier of his revolutionary opera Tristan und Isolde at the Königliches Hof- und Nationaltheater in Munich on 10 June 1865 with Hans von Bülow conducting. It was revolutionary for the music was unlike any the audience had heard before; specifically the "Tristan chord" with which the opera begins and which remains unresolved until the final moments of the opera, and marked the beginning of a new age of music that would see the rise of composers from Mahler to Debussy, and Schoenberg with the second Viennese circle.

But this music, and the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer with which it is imbued, influenced the artistic world beyond music. One of those influenced was a young author from northern Germany who, at the age of twenty-six in 1901, had just published a major family saga and a handful of short stories. This author, Thomas Mann, would write a novella entitled Tristan, setting it in a sanatorium called Einfried, "Enclosure", beside which "the mountains, massive, fir green, and softly rugged, tower toward the heavens."
Mann uses music as an integral part of this short story about a middle-class woman, Gabrielle Kloterjahn, who comes under the spell of a writer, Detlev Spinell, who in addition to his writing (he had published one book) was an affable, affectionate, and even enthusiastic aesthete. He was often "carried away in sheer admiration for something beautiful: the harmony of two colors, a vase with a noble shape, the mountains illuminated by the sunset." His response would be simply "How beautiful!" While he is a vain and pompous man, he is capable of great influence with is intense pursuit of his own aesthetic purity.

Gabrielle found herself alone in the sanatorium as her burger husband had departed and she was interested to find that there was a "writer" present for she "had never before met a writer face-to-face." It was not long before Herr Spinell was socializing with her and moved quickly from being merely "helpful" to being "devoted" to her. For Gabrielle was an artist herself, as a amateur musician who played the piano. She is at Einfried to rest and recover from a general malaise and weakness following giving birth to a child. She was prescribed a rest cure as part of her potential return to health. While this precluded playing the piano she could not resist the insistence of the charming Spinell to play the piano for him. What harm could there be in yielding to the enjoyment of a simple, yet beautiful, nocturne by Frederic Chopin.

This moment that seems so innocent is ironically the moment when the story turns; when the yearning of Gabrielle for something beyond reality, beyond "mere appearances", that has been suggested by her conversations with Her Spinell, becomes something much darker. Mann is not subtle with the coming of sunset yielding phrases like "darkness is already setting in." And Gabrielle observing that "yesterday we still had broad daylight at this time; and now it's already dusk." Thus playing a nocturne is quite appropriate, but she moves on to play another and another. Then Spinell offers her a piano transcription of Wagner's liebestod music from Tristan und Isolde.
"the yearning motif, a lonesome and wandering voice in the night, softly utters its anxious question. A stillness and a waiting. And lo, a response: the same timid and lonesome strain, only clearer, only more delicate. Another hush. And now, with that muted and wonderful sforzando, which is like passion rousing itself and blissfully flaring up, the love motif emerged, ascended, rapturously struggled upward to sweet interlacing, sank back, dissolving, and, with their deep crooning of grave and painful ecstasy, the cellos came to the fore and carried the melody away . . . ."

This moment, this music, is the signal that Gabrielle will not recover, that the love she and Spinell have will only last till her death. Her husband is asked to return and, is presented with a strange letter written by Spinell to Herr Kloterjahn, a letter in which Spinell describes his vision of beauty as experienced in and with Gabrielle, but also condemns Herr Kloterjahn as the enemy, the antithesis of true beauty and love. Herr Kloterjahn really has no idea what Spinell means, yet Spinell is also a sickly example, a pale imitation of the true aesthete. The beauty of Wagner's magnificent motif merging Eros and Thanatos is wasted on the merely melodramatic and overwrought pair. The novella ends not just with the death of Gabrielle, but also with Spinell trying to mentally escape from the aesthetic moment he had experienced at Einfried.

El

Rating: really liked it
There are some wonderful short stories in this collection, but the real meat of the book is, of course, the title novella, Death in Venice. I'm in no way diminishing the other stories and highly recommend them but still, moving right along...

Gustav von Aschenbach is a middle-aged writer who decides he needs to do a little traveling to find self-fulfillment and chooses Venice as his destination. While there he falls in love with (or obsessed with, it's all a very thin line) a young Polish boy, Tadzio; Aschenbach tells himself that his interest in the boy is merely creative fascination and nothing more than that. Uh huh. As time passes and his interest in the boy grows, Aschenbach battles his own sexual appetite and his own mortality. Fearing the aging process Aschenbach has himself dolled up to look younger, in actuality making himself look exactly as he would have despised in the beginning of the story, but his own passion overrides what he is trying to become.

Not just another gay story, the relationship between Aschenbach and Tadzio is actually quite beautiful and heartwrenching. I found myself cheering for the dirty old man chasing down the little boy. Which then in turn made me feel dirty. But really... it's a wonderful story.

Keith

Rating: really liked it
firstly, i don't feel like this is a story is about a pedophile. to apply terms like "homosexual" and "pedophile" is to grossly malign the intentions of the author. just like calling somebody a "black" instead of a "human being" is a limiting statement, not a summary. this is a story about desire. nothingness, perfection and humanity are all explored in the story also. the vastness of the sea represents a sort of perfect nothingness, a void. in one particular scene, a human actually interrupts this perfection in the form of Tadzio walking across the horizon line in Aschenbach's field of vision:

"as he sat there dreaming thus, deep, deep into the void, suddenly the margin line of the shore was cut by a human form. He gathered up his gaze and withdrew it from the illimitable..."

here, it's as if Aschenbach's appreciation of perfection shifts from the unattainable nothingness of the sea to the more tangible, Eros-like beauty of the boy.

Later on the same page, Aschenbach is still admiring the boy, and seeing him frown at the Russian family on the beach "gave to the godlike and inexpressible the final human touch."

Aschenbach is not drooling over this boy's sculpted rear or the wisp of hair under his belly button. This is not sexual longing. If anything, I thought his makeover towards the end of the book is more out of an effort to emulate Tadzio, to attain his perfection, than to woo him. Earlier in the story, he sees an old man playing with some youths, trying to conceal his age with cosmetics and clothing, and Aschenbach is offended by this. it seems more likely that Aschenbach becomes this man that he initially rebukes for his falseness. Jung believed that what we dislike most in others is what we are afraid is true of ourselves. perhaps Aschenbach's response to the Old-youth, as I think he calls him, foreshadows the falsehood of Aschenbach's later transformation into a dark-haired, carmine-cheeked, full-lipped old man.

To be disgusted by the taboo aspect of the story is to consider sex the only endpoint of desire. Desire can be thought of as man's response to perfection. Desire can be actualized through ownership, possession, or through art by capture. One sees a beautiful flower and takes a photograph, writes a sonnet, paints a canvas to try and capture its perfection. In this story, Aschenbach does attempt to write in Tadzio's presence, as if he's working through different expressions of desire in his lack of self-understanding.

Death in Venice lacks sex or sexual thoughts. Any disgust in the reader towards the nonexistent consummation of Aschenbach's desire is almost like an autobiographical statement about the reader's own desires and transgressions, which is the most interesting thing about the story.

----

I do feel like Death in Venice suffers from the worst kind of literary allusion. Passages like this:

" 'Aha, little Phaeax,' he thought. 'It seems you are priveleged to sleep yourself out.' With sudden gaiety he quoted:

'Oft veranderten Schmuck und warme Bader and Ruhe.'

He took lesirely breakfast. The porter came up..."

just irritate me, because they do little to advance the narrative or the mood and they don't elucidate tricky points by providing analogy. they're just there so that you have to look them up, like neon flashbulbs on the Las Vegas strip, shouting, "this is high art!"

I don't feel like the inclusion of Greek mythology somehow "elevates" a work of literature. When I see references to mythology in a novel, I simply assume that the mythological referent is very similar to the situation in the book, except that it happened a long time ago. i didn't bother to look up who "Phaeax" was because, frankly, I don't care. That connection would not flesh out the character or the situation for me, just as the allusion in the phrase, "chocolate-covered strawberries are my Achilles heel" does not add any depth to the expressed description.

When well utilized, allusion can be very effective. T.S. Eliot often uses it to further a mood that he's developing, always "making it new." He does not rely on the allusion to do the work for him, and often times it will suffice on its own without the reader understanding its background. For example, in The Waste Land, the final line of this stanza is from Tristan and Isolde and it roughly translates to "desolate and empty is the sea:"

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.

It builds upon the emptiness in the previous lines (the 'nothing', the 'silence'), by evoking a scene where the dying Tristan is waiting for Isolde's ship to appear in the bay, but it fails to show. Even if the reader does not know the origins of the final line, it still works. It feels like it could be part of the poem.

In Thomas Mann, the allusions seem contrived, a cheap trick for creating density where there really is none.

Wiom biom

Rating: really liked it
For those interested in Thomas Mann: https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernis...

Thomas Mann is really shaping up to become one of my favourite writers!

All the short stories were memorable and hit close to home.

I think there are two factors which stand out for me when reading Mann -- his writing style and the themes he tends to write about.

Mann's writing style is lucid, humorous, tragicomic, and ironic (non-exhaustive list of adjectives), being at once cerebral and full of sensibility. Take the ending of 'Little Herr Friedemann' for example:

'He dragged himself on his stomach further down the slope, lifted the upper part of his body and let it drop into the water. He did not raise his head again; even his legs on the bank lay still.

The splash had silenced the crickets for a moment. Now they began their chirping as before, the park rustled softly and down the long avenue came the muted sound of laughter.'

Here, Mann expresses in such brevity the emotional devastation experienced by the rejected lover while maintaining a critical detachment which introduces the element of tragicomedy, making it possible for the reader to sympathise but also to laugh at the protagonist. For the horribly insecure (applying to Mann, his protagonists, and the reviewer), such an approach is as natural as it gets.

I have often thought about how we need writers, artists and musicians for the unassailable fact that there are people who are much more articulate than the average person; while most of us feel the itch to write, to draw, to compose, we could benefit from accepting that there are works of art out there which already express what we want to express in the most sublime way possible.

Mann does it for me.

In his short stories, he explores such relatable themes as the Self v.s. the Other (being an outsider), Self-Doubt and Insecurity, Life v.s. Art, Rationality v.s. Sensuality (the classic Apollo/Dionysus dialectic), and forbidden love. Once again, this list is not exhaustive.

Throughout all of the short stories I read, I believe an overarching similarity is the use of an antihero who is marked by a flawed and at times delusional perception of himself and of the people around him (as aesthetes are no doubt prone to), and who eventually acts on those perceptions to his mortification. Mann builds his protagonists up, giving us access to their thoughts and feelings, only to casually undermine and abandon them entirely at the end. This is partly facilitated by his use of free indirect speech, and the shifting back and fro of focalisation from the protagonist to the narrator. This, as David Luke remarks, can be seen in the use of a shadowy narrator-figure with a distinct viewpoint in Tristan.

Brief overview of short stories:

Little Herr Friedemann had a perfect ending and that image of Friedemann drowning with his legs still on the river bank is one I will never forget.

The Joker, being the only story written in first person, was highly relatable and I especially liked the protagonist's reflections on the importance of self-respect.

'To have lost one's self-respect: that is what unhappiness is. Oh, I have always known that so well! Everything else is part of the game, an enrichment of one's life; in every other form of suffering one can feel such extraordinary self-satisfaction, one can cut such a fine figure. Only when one has fallen out with oneself and no longer suffers with a good conscience, only in the throes of stricken vanity -- only then does one become a pitiful and repulsive spectacle.'

The Road to the Churchyard follows a bitter bachelor on his way to the churchyard, during which he pathetically curses at a youthful boy riding a bicycle on the gravel road (which he was not apparently not supposed to). Once again, the ending image of him collapsing at the end and being carried into an ambulance with such precision as though it were a 'pantomime' is one for the ages.

Gladius Dei was the weakest story for me because the religious subject-matter, inspired by the Dominican prior Girolamo Savonarola's rebellion against the neo-pagan cult of sensuous beauty in Lorenzo de Medici's Florence, was not particularly relatable. Nevertheless, the story was short and sweet, and also gripping. 'May the sword of God come down upon this earth, swiftly and soon!' Indeed!

Tristan is another woefully hilarious story, and the most memorable incident is probably the protagonist, Detlev Spinell, writing and having the post service deliver a delusional and uncharacteristically assertive letter to someone who was just in the neighbouring room, only to lose his daring when the recipient confronted him afterwards, instead choosing to correct his trivial linguistic errors to feel in control. This story is great for approaching the life/art binary as the protagonist is clearly on an extreme end here (aesthete, divorced from reality). Also, the Tristan und Isolde episode is a highlight.

Tonio Kroger is Mann's favourite short story (he likes it the most and he thinks it's the most well-written) but it was the weakest one for me. Nevertheless, I appreciated the gay puppy love section (sad it got swiftly replaced with a heterosexual romance) which reminded me Kai X Hanno from Buddenbrooks; on a side note, I'm beginning to think Mann had a uniform (or specifically a sailor-uniform) fetish. In this story, Mann also deals with the tension between Life and Art/Intellect, as Kroger is a struggling writer who continually pines for vitality, in the form of Hans and Inge and more archetypically the blond and blue-eyed Aryan. In the ballroom, Kroger only observes as the 'Hans' and 'Inge' dance, being a wallflower or simply an outsider. The way Kroger feels an attraction to things he does not have and which he may never have really hit home for me; consider this sentence: 'In it there is longing, and sad envy, and just a touch of contempt, and a whole world of innocent delight.' According to David Luke, 'Mann and Kroger are identified in the new position of a still distanced but reconciled outsider', with 'Art and Intellect [no longer being] at open war with ordinary existence, but sentimentally [and] unhappily.'

And finally, Death in Venice! This was the hardest to read because of the classical allusions (that Phaedrus allegory) and I had really high expectations of it but I was honestly not let down. The tale explores the Apollo/Dionysus dialectic by following a reputable writer as he succumbs to his primal desires and begins preying, albeit from a distance, on a teenage boy. I loved the back and froing of Aschenbach as he battled with himself whether or not to leave Venice; I loved the sustained tension as it is gradually revealed that there is a plague in Venice; I loved, most of all, the ending. Aschenbach is hopelessly delusional, suspecting that the boy returns his feelings, and right at the end, as Tadzio stands ankle-deep in the sea with his hands on his hips and he turns to look at Aschenbach, the irrational pedophile thinks he is being beckoned to and takes a step towards him, only to collapse and die anticlimactically.