Death in Venice

What is not to be completely speechless with? This is the story of "a gray haired man" and his unusual, distant passion for a young boy. The descriptions of the setting are great. We get into the head of the main character in a brilliant manner as only Thomas Mann could take us. Astounding!!! As readers, ourselves, we experience the conflict, the desire, the overtaking of reason, and, the cost. This is one of the 50 books that ought to be read by every thinking person. The topic isn't for everyone, but, for those who can accept the topic, the writing on his obsession is magnificent!!! A++. Highly recommended.

Thomas Mann's masterful short novel "Death in Venice" (1912) tells the story of a distinguished German writer, Gustav Aschenbach, who, at the age of 53 while on holiday in Venice, develops a passion for a 14-year old boy named Tadzio. Mann's story sets the demands and powers of eros, human sexuality, in the form of Aschenbach's feelings for Tadzio, against the life, of intellect, discipline, artistic creation, and order which Aschenbach had, before his fateful passion, attempted to realize in his life. Mann's story is highly organized and beautifully controlled, meeting the artistic and intellectual demands of his protagonist, Aschenbach. Yet the story exudes passion and eroticism, in Aschebach's homosexual attraction for a young adolescent, the dank gondolas of Venice, the fetid epidemic that plagues the city, and the atmosphere of death and destruction that Mann captures in his work. The story is full of allusions to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium and, I think, to the Bacchae of Euripides. Mann's story offers a disturbing picture of the claims of sexuality and eroticism, particularly on the life of the mind, and of the consequences of repressing them. I was grateful for the opportunity to reread "Death in Venice" in a book group, and my understanding of the work was increased by this excellent collection of seven of Mann's early short stories in a volume edited by David Luke. It is available at a modest price. The six other stories in the volume were written earlier than "Death in Venice" and show a unity of theme with this great work. Each of the stories juxtaposes the life of the artist, the outsider trying to observe and understand, with the claims of passion. The artists involved, the passions, and the results differ among the stories, but the underlying theme remains the same. "Tonio Kroger" (1903), an extended short story, shows an aspiring writer infatuated in his youth with a school friend and, subsequently, with the girl his friend marries. He years to be part of what he deems "the bright children of life, the happy, the charming, and the ordinary" while recognizing that this is not to be for him. "Tonio Kroger" was Mann's own favorite among his works and it presents the theme of "Death in Venice" -- intellect and passion in a different way and light. The extended story "Tristan" (1903) also is based upon a conflict over a young woman, set in a sanitorium, between a dandified writer and her business-like matter-of-fact husband. Mann's love for Wagner and for music are also at the center of this story. The remaining four stories also develop the theme of passion as a disturbing force in what appears to be a settled life. I particularly enjoyed the short opening work, "Little Herr Friedemann" (1897) in which a young man who becomes hunchbacked and reserved as a result of an accident in infancy is humiliated and rejected when he feels the stirrings of passion in the person of a beautiful 24 year

All of these stories were written when Mann was in his early twenties, and he always felt he would never surpass them. It is not hard to see why; they are suffused with the intensity and bitter-sweetness of despair that only youth can bring. By turns tragic and comic, the dark corners of Venice shall linger in the mind long after you have turned the page.

I don't have much more to add to Grady Harp's effusive praise, except to say that I pretty much agree with his main points. I first read the classic H.T. Lowe Porter translation in college and liked it then . . . anything for a thorough expose of what it means--or necessarily used to mean--to be gay and aging. Even Lowe Porter's fusty Edwardian strains, imparting dignity and Olympian tragedy to the drama, seemed apt at the time for a life--in the middle of another pestilence--that seemed to offer no happy ending.But since then we've had Will and Grace and countless gay characters, mostly minor, in films and on TV--and one of the great things is that it's okay to laugh about it all. Even at what we in the community used to call tragic and sometimes in our bitchier moments still do. This translation invites us to smile, and even occasionally howl. By giving Aschenbach an obsession with the Greek gods (toward the end he uses the words god and godlike about a dozen times in two pages), Mann not only shows us what was required at the time as a good alibi or cover for homosexual tendencies (not even "identities")--"classical culture" and "noble classicism" and so on: everything that involved nude boys and swimming hole frolics and attention served to youth and beauty in young beauties--but also gave us in the future (inadvertantly, I don't know, since I don't read German) the keys to understanding a period in which so-called bourgeois culture needed its literature and high art to justify the ancients' curious sexual habits. An almost neurasthenic obsession with youth and health and beauty being an ironic side feature of cultured life.The result for Mann, in one instance, is a wonderfully dry scene in which the old writer goes to the barber and frowns at his "pinched face" in the mirror, thereby unleashing a torrent of rationales from the barber for working his own art on the aging artist: dye job, little curl here and there, rouge. It's an astoundingly paced and worded moment, and what it leads up to is more dramatic and complex than I remembered in the most famous version. It's not so much about loneliness and a necessarily tragic life, it turns out in this makeover, as about the way we hide ourselves, cloak ourselves, in the identities the world wants to see. That's the tragedy Mann's getting at. Now the yellowing lenses of post-Victorianism have been lifted to reveal this more clearly.So, three cheers for Michael Henry Heim--and five stars!

Death in Venice is one of the most moving works of fiction I have ever read in my life, and it is also a story that I never tire of reading. There is a haunting, dream-like quality to the tale itself, reinforced by the almost hypnotic prose brilliantly deployed by Thomas Mann. On the surface, it would seem to be a sordid story about a middle-aged man's tragic infatuation for a young boy, whilst on holiday in Venice. On reading it however, it becomes clear that it is not a story about homosexuality as such, but rather a profound consideration of the transcendent nature of beauty perceived by the senses. Yes, Gustav Von Ascherbach presents a tragic figure, chasing the object of his affections all over Venice. And, yes this infatuation also leads to his eventual doom. But, paradoxically, this new-found passion leads to his spiritual rebirth, as he realizes how beauty not only gives meaning to his art, but also to his own life. His love for Tadzio is a pure love. Through Tadzio he is being reconciled with himself, and his own sensual nature, after a lifetime of restraint and relentless self-discipline. So,for me, the underlying theme of this magnificent story is that "love really does conquer all" Please read it- you will be hooked for life!