Death in Venice

"...where the hideous death lurked in secret—at such times the atrocious seemed to him rich in possibilities, and laws of morality had dropped away."

The novel astonished me. It wasn't what I expected. It is quite brilliant, a masterpiece.

Unlike others, I didn't find this novel explicitly about pedophilia--unlike Lolita, which distinctly and undeniably is. I know that won't sit well with everyone. I can understand that. When I watched the 1971 film of the novel, that pedophilia lust was a major aspect and exacerbated by the shameful exploitation and lack of protection for "the most beautiful boy in the world," the real youth, Björn Andrésen. But the novel is about so much more than that. It is about lust, but also lust for life, for show more youth, for beauty, for being loved in spite of outward appearances (ironic, I know) by a misguided man who never so much as even speaks a word to the boy.

The man is Gustav von Aschenbach, age 50, who, up to this point, has over-intellectualized his whole life, putting Art with a capitol A as the most desirable and potent of all things. He has never been a physically robust or a remarkably attractive person and does not seem to, thus far, possess any passion, except in theory. He has a grown daughter and had a wife who has since died. He describes their marriage as having been happy, although that seems faint praise since he doesn't even call her by name. From an early age, he has given his truest devotions to his work. That is what has provided his life, if not passion, its meaning, satisfaction, staid acclimation, respectability, honors, and financial reward. His work has been accomplished with deliberate study and steadfastness. His whole identity is Artist. A tightly controlled one.

When he decides to go for a vacation to Venice ("Not far, not all the way to the tigers"), it is the first sign Aschenbach is not quite as satisfied as he once was. He is repulsed by ugliness, and especially the ugliness of, we slowly learn, of aging. And he is aging.

The brilliance of Mann is how deftly he takes readers down the emotionally stifled deterioration of Aschenbach, through so many successively progressive stages, until ultimately to his complete humiliated, unraveled, unfettered indulgence of his long ignored emotions.

Upon seeing a remarkably beautiful 14 year old boy at his Venice hotel (we can agree that we too can be momentarily smitten by a remarkable beauty, at any age; we too have eyes)--begins in earnest his slow but pointed rejection of his own aging and transforms the rejection into an absurd hope, then obsession, and then a truly wicked disregard for danger. All for the sake of a ridiculous projected fantasy of a reciprocal budding love with this boy. An elixir.

It's not an easy novel to experience, but it's not exactly about outright sexual deviance either. It is full moral abandonment of self-regard due to fear of aging and death.

It's a story of such pathos, repugnance, and, under Mann's genius, deep sadness, even pity. Aschenbach began a needlessly tragic journey with a mere natural, but much belated observation about his own capacity for lust that he has dismissed since his youth for the sake of his plans for success. When his intellectualizing about Eros and Socrates and whatever Classicism he has hitherto relied on for balance and harmony, when those begin to ring more and more hollow, he progressively becomes consumed by "the tigers" he once avoided, to self obliteration.

And it started with a small belated recognition of delight in feelings,

"Past emotions, precious early afflictions and yearnings which had been stifled by his rigorous programme of living, were now returning in such strange new forms. With an embarrassed, astonished smile, he recognized them..." show less

Creepy and disturbing like a fever dream, as infection encroaches on the city and corruption on the protagonist's soul with the same icky stench.

Also, weird book to read during a pandemic! deeply upsetting and grimly funny at the same time? All this stuff about how the authorities are trying to hush up the situation so as not to spook the tourists, and the numbers of sick and dead are printed in the newspapers every morning, but the numbers shift around and are unreliable, and some people are saying the problem is being overblown, and the government is trying to put public health measures in place, but no one is sure if they are effective, and the people are uncooperative because they are worried about their businesses suffering...

show more target="_top">https://donut-donut.dreamwidth.org/828141.html show less

It can be a joy to be wrong sometimes. Going into this collection I didn't have much to go on regarding Thomas Mann. I'd heard some biographical details and titles of works, but nothing more. I'd heard his name mentioned in the same breaths and sentences as Kafka, Goethe, Hesse, in German literature particularly, and in the same vein along some of the writers of the highest echelons of the world generally, but I, for lack of a better term, never got around to him. I expected him to be the runt of the German litter, the one who came late to the party and only made it in by the skin of his teeth. I was wrong beyond words.

But one early evening segueing languidly into night in Jerusalem, I popped into a used bookshop (which, wonderfully, show more Jerusalem has plenty of) and picked up a few tomes for my soon to be coming move back to America. I was in an odd state of mind as I was tremendously relieved to be traveling back to the country of my upbringing with all that that entailed...but I was also more than a bit sad, troubled even, that I hadn't succeeded in Israel. Not getting into the army, not learning Hebrew quickly enough to get a job to improve it further and also being unable to attain the Masters degree I had to set out to obtain...I was tired, so tired, in so many ways.

On that night though, I picked up (if I recall correctly) Peer Gynt, a copy of A History of Ancient Philosophy, and this Thomas Mann collection.

A lot happened between my buying the collection and my actually reading it. For one thing, I left Israel and spent an eventful and infinitely memorable six days in Estonia. After that I made my way back home to California. It was there I started thumbing through Death in Venice.

It was a slow process. I thought after reading Saul Bellow I'd be ready for languid prose that took it's time and suffused the pages as well as nearly overwhelmed the reader with no acquiescence to ease or convenience. But Bellow would be the speaker at the dinner party, the man surrounded by onlookers throwing out as many cultured references and allusions as he can muster in an attempt to do through force what a writer like Mann, the one sitting around a fire place with a sparse but intimate number of friends can do easily, casually, with no less effort, but with infinitely more grace, calculation, and, dare I say, skill.

Death in Venice is haunting to me because it acts, completely knowingly, as a collapsing bridge between two exclusive worlds beyond joining, that are also inexorably linked. The ancient world of the classics, of Greek, of Latin, of Gods and and passion and feeling more fluid, more primal than what we have now. And the second world, our ostensible world, a world trying harder and harder to divest itself of its more flexible, even more sylvan past, and maintain everything through repetitious, near dogmatic assertions of reason, logic, philosophy, science, all of it meant to make explicable, make real, make palatable our reality. But Mann in this story, depicts a man torn in half who vacillates between straddling the line and, finally, inevitably, letting it cut him in two, destroying him utterly. It's a fecund and feverish story that's relentless in its artistry. Objectionable due to the content? Of a grown man fallen in hopeless love and lust for a boy? Oh, most definitely. But that's the point. It's from this vantage point Mann shows us two worlds colliding, and all the passionate and destructive fallout that ensues. It's a lush and even deadly story.

Now, as for the rest of the collection. What can I possibly say? They are all excellent. And considering this is a short story collection that's doubly impressive. I don't think I've ever given a perfect score to any collection like this before, not even Joyce's Dubliners. Tonio Kruger is as beautiful an authorial and even artistic manifesto as one is likely to find (hand in hand with Portrait of the Artist), Man and his Dog is a humble and warm slice of life, Tristan is a maddening look at human frailty and the power coupled with futility of the written word, Blood of the Walsungs is a masterwork of decadence and narcissism and an incredible depiction of an empty and superficial generation descending into apathy and slow irrelevant death. Mario and the Magician is a deft satire about the rise of character based cults in German leadership and chilling given its context. Disorder and Early Sorrow feels like a blueprint for later works, a slow and drawn out exhalation that still holds true and still shows the keenness of Mann's vision. And finally Felix Krull, while funny, is also unexpectedly tragic, so much so that I believe the last few lines of it, of a son paying tribute to a dead father through the gift of his tears, will stay with me for quite some time, if not for the rest of my time I read and think.

It's a powerful collection, at times, many times, even sublime. Please devote yourself to it when you get a chance, make the time for it even. It's worth far and beyond the time and energy needed to read it and will pay you back emotionally, even spiritually, in dividends, as an affirmation or possibly a reaffirmation of the awesome and necessary power of true words written by a divinely skilled hand. And now, as per a friend's advice, I must start the Magic Mountain, possibly even putting my life on hold until it's finished and appreciated fully. show less

Death in Venice is a novella written by German author, Thomas Mann. It was first published in 1912. It is a story about a writer who is suffering from writer’s block. He visits Venice and finds himself liberated, uplifted and then obsessed by the sight of a beautiful boy. Though he never actually speaks to the boy, or has any contact whatsoever, the writer feels a great passion. This obsession that he feels distracts him from the fact that rumors have begun to circulate about a disease that is spreading through the city.

Although a slim volume, Death in Venice is far from light reading. Strangely decadent and uncomfortable yet beautifully written the author uses the contrast between the young boy and the elderly author to symbolize the show more variation between youth and old age, as well as external and internal beauty and, of course, life and death. This symbolic story definitely held my attention but I felt myself more drawn to his writing style than to the story itself. show less

Right after I revisited Death in Venice, in whose cult I counted myself as a teen, I perused this history of interpretation: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice: A Novella and its Critics. I’ve come to the conclusion that this story which rests on atmophere and symbolism is an ‘As You Like It’ affair: interpretations range wildly, and Mann did not in fact give certain information as to his intentions. Besides, with a plot like this, how was he to speak out, post-publication, without positions of defence and postures in response to criticism?

Death in Venice keeps its mystery, or rather, its individuality, as if written for you to make of it ‘What You Will’ (another Shakespeare title. It’s apt somehow).

I know that, devoted as I am show more to this little book at story-level, I can happily live with Death in Venice for the rest of my life, read the English translations, and each time see a different meaning in its swirl of dream and intellectualisation around Beauty, Truth and Art. At the moment I might say it’s like that line of Keats: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Which in turn has been to me a statement more to ponder than to understand. Death in Venice can be seen as a radical challenge to that line, a cruel refutation, a glorious endorsement. I just don’t know. Did Mann? show less

This is my first experience of Thomas Mann and I am staggered by how much he can pack into a book that I would term more a novella than a novel. First off, nobody would accuse Mann of not being intellectual enough. I stopped several times to ponder the classical allusions that were scattered throughout the story, some of them obvious references and some of them so subtle that they might easily escape your notice. None of them irrelevant, however; all contributing something to the meaning and understanding of the story and most foreshadowing the outcome.

The strange conveyance, handed down without any change from days of yore, and so peculiarly black--the only other thing that black is a coffin--recalls hushed criminal adventures in the show more night, accompanied only by the quiet splashing of water; even more, it recalls death itself, the bier and the dismal funeral and the final taciturn passage. And have you observed that the seat in such a boat, that armchair painted black like a coffin and upholstered in a dull black, is the softest, most luxurious and enervating seat in the world?

What a visceral writer he is! Once he engaged me, he kept me to the end, which was one of the finest endings I could imagine. I would caution other readers that the start of this is extremely laborious and slow. It provides information that is essential to understanding this man and his ramblings, but I had to push through the first two chapters. Once Aschenbach makes the decision to go to Venice, the writing begins to flow.

There is a predatory element to this novel that makes the reader cringe. Unlike the perversion in Lolita, this perversion is kept in the right perspective for me; the child is innocent and there is no pretense that there is anything pure or acceptable about the thoughts of this old man.

There are numerous themes running through this novel. The irony of a man who criticizes others for faults he so obviously shares; the contrast between youth and old age, innocence and corruption; the presence of death in the midst of life; and the corrosive nature of self-importance. It is a novel that begs to be dissected with a scalpel. Can’t say I “enjoyed” it, but I do think it is an important piece of literature that conjure up Poe’s Mask of the Red Death and Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Grey for me. show less

For all the potential intrigue of this novel, I found it slightly underwhelming. The protagonist - an author past his prime - indulges his own whims and obsessions even with the claim at the outset of the story of being an industrious artisan of extreme discipline. I’m not sure if the theory of the mid-life crisis was an identified theme pre-WWI, but Thomas Mann has clearly tapped into the essence of the middle-aged man who reaches his peak achievement in life (in Gusdtav’s case, he has gained literary fame and has built a stable life for himself) and then throws everything away for want of knowing what to do with himself. Going on a summer jaunt to Venice is not really our traveller’s crime here, but I can’t see his obsession show more with the Polish boy, Tadzio, as anything other than a kind of sick mania. Gustav is a widower, so his emotional latching on to the sickly youth is clearly at odds with his “normative” lifestyle and his stalking behaviour is an engagement that flirts very directly with danger. At the climax of the novel, which I view as his discovery of the truth about the cholera epidemic, does nothing to halt his rash behaviour. It is only with his death - once again staring out at the boy who has come to rule his life - that the reader is brought to any sort of ending, even though it does not seem to fit the building of the narrative. Is Mann a critic of Gustav? Or does he prefer the romanticism of dying with one’s life’s goals unattained, but steeped in passion? It is an odd ending to a strange story, and seems to bring the reader back to the centre of the narrative, as we are kept perpetually waiting for Tadzio’s true reaction to his stalker’s affections. show less