Customer Reviews

Death in Venice: And Seven Other Stories

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Thomas Mann wrote "Death in Venice" in 1911. The protagonist, formerly a self-controlled and respectable public figure, gives himself over to obsessively stalking a 14-year-old boy for whom he has erotic feelings. While these feelings would be unacceptable to most people in our era, it is still difficult for us to appreciate the degree of condemnation they would have attracted when this story was written. Yet, Sigmund Freud had published The Interpretation of Dreams a decade earlier, and German intellectuals like Thomas Mann were aware that censurable urges lurk beneath conscious notice within all of us. Through this story, the author was surely struggling to come to terms with his own homoerotic urges. Judging from what he wrote, these were deeply troubling to him: corruption, decay, and condemnation are the themes he presents to us. While the images conveyed through this story are repugnant and shocking, the writing is beautiful and affecting.

Several of the other stories in this volume are of similar quality, and similarly deal with troubling themes ("Mario and the Magician," "The Blood of the Walsungs"). Yet, Mann was also capable of an extended and sincerely felt appreciation of the more benign and wholesome aspects of our world ("A Man and His Dog").

These stories are worth reading and re-reading. Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, and these stories, if not Nobel prize quality, at the very least show Mann to be an engaging and entertaining writer.

Mann is to be struggled with; his work to be attacked and repulsed - it is the embodiment of engaging, challenging fiction. It may be advisable to start out with Mario and the Magician, a splendid and accessible story of a hypnotist performing amazing acts on an incredulous audience that is itself hypnotic in alluring its character audience and the reader into a seeminly pedestrian story that turns out to have a whimsical, fantastic denouement. M&M also doubles as a grand metaphor for the fascism that was beginning to grip Germany - the awesome power of a tyrant and the dangerous nakedness of a raptured audience.

Mann passes the test of great writing, in that even in translation, one can appreciate the literary dexterity of a master at work - a writer carried away, inhabiting each sentence of his story. Some of his lesser stories, towards the end of the anthology, are sprawling introspectives and thoroughgoing accounts of places and things.

Death in Venice is a seminal work and sets the tone for Mann's subtle revelations of repressed passions and the tabboo. Mann elegantly lays bare human souls, yet keeping the lid safely fastened to the pressured jar. One of my favorites was Toni Kroger - a touching story of an artist's life, from young man to mature adult. Mann renders beautifully unrequited love and homosocial admiration by the introverted for the extroverts. In reading his stories, we may find that he expresses memories and feelings that were always there, but could not find the words for before. That, perhaps, is the highest achievement of a writer.

The reviews here are all right on. This collection may be the best intro to the GREATEST 20th Century Author..(OK, you may not agree.) Much of Mann is difficult and dense,even for me, a longtime devotee. In this collection, start off with MARIO, a superior look at the sacred and profane. We find a German tourist and his young family in Italy going into a seemingly harmless carnival-type show. The author's portrait of the innocent young is itself worth the entire book,their enchantment at the acts,until an ugly mesmorist makes his appearance performing seemingly impossible tricks on members of the crowd. Slowly, the innocent crowd has been hooked, the children awed by the whole thing, until the final,inevitable end. Reading this,I thought,"Are there really people out there who can perform such acts?" Who knows, but this story is surely a classic,along with the six others, mainly described in other reviews.

Thomas Mann may be an acquired taste in literature; he himself admitted that he had great difficulty knowing when to stop. Buddenbrooks, his autobiographically-based novel of a Northern German merchant family before WWI was supposed to be a short book of about 250 pages, like a Scandinavian novel. Well, it is far longer, and if you like Mann, you are glad of it.

However, tackling The Magic Mountain, with its long philosophical discourses, or other Mann novels is a lot easier if you begin with these short works. (Short is relative; Death in Venice was supposed to be a short story and ended up, predictably, a novella.) The themes in these works show up again in Mann's other writings; Tristan in particular, is a sketch for The Magic Mountain (thumbnail sketch, to be sure.) Tonio Kroger resembles Buddenbrooks in the autobiographical details and setting. The theme of sexual perversion and decadence heading to destruction (supposedly a metaphor for the society of pre-war Germany) appear in both Death in Venice and Blood of the Walsungs.

If you are new to Thomas Mann, these works are a wonderful place to start. If you grow to love his writing, re-reading these is always a pleasure.

When I think of Mann, and of this book in particular, I am caught up in epithets and contradictions: insightful, artistic, polished, brooding, ponderous, pretentious, time-bound, and slow. I cannot think of this book without thinking that it is an expression of a past era, yet an expression with some universal themes about human psyche and behavior. Mann is the highest literary embodiment of Nietzschean depth psychology and his philosophy of the Appollonian-Dionysian duality. He puts this Nietzsche-ism in the dialogues and monologues of his characters. I dare say that all of his *main* characters have been infected by something irrational and Dionysian, which they cannot shake off. Their souls have been skewed. They need to play out their drama, but not before a dose of philosophizing seeps into the story through conversations and reflections. Consequently, in this collection of short stories, the stories are not short at all, and some of them go for over 40 pages.

What Mann portrays are characters affected by Nietzschean philosophy and Freudian psychology but in a subdued and cultured way. They are usually not frenzied or overtly irrational. Their layer of normality is rather thick, but beneath that layer, deterioration of the human soul continues. Whether it is an aged artist who is a repressed homosexual pedophile, a brooding young man of mixed ethnic heritage in the nationalist Germany, or the incestuous twins--all of them are living expressions of the breakdown of orthodoxy and dysfunctional life in the labyrinth of human history.

Aschenbach, an ageing, ascetic author makes up his mind to visit Venice in the hope of encountering "distant scenes". There he becomes wildly infatuated with a fourteen-year-old Polish boy, the Hyacinth of myth, named Tazio. The narrative centres around the fumbling and pathetic attempts made by the protagonist to address the object of his love, eventually resulting in the death of the aged Aschenbach. Mann seems interested in establishing parallels between Aschenbach's condition and the ideals of classical antiquity, as the substantial [mis]-quotations from Plato's "Phaedrus" make clear. However, the story lends itself to other interpretations, such as the asethetics of Nietzsche, with its duality of "Apollinism" and "Dionysism", of which Mann was a fervent disciple. Aschenbach's dignified, ordered, rational, harmonious, Apolline existence can be read as being ruptured by the irrational force of the Dionysian, the instinct of intoxication and self-destructive excess. Similarly, Mann's portrayal of Aschenbach's infatuation with Tazio can be interpreted along Freudian lines. What of the scene in which Aschenbach is set to leave Venice but loses his bags, then returns and it is only *after* the fact that he discovers the real reason for his return? This is clearly a dramatisation of what Freud terms neurosis, the conflict between an unconscious desire and a prohibitive command of the conscious. The elevated, detached, "objective" style shows Mann to have been committed to the classical paradigms of narrative and composition and, in this respect, he invites comparison with Flaubert.

I was given "Death in Venice" by a close friend. Scary how well she knows me. It was the perfect gift.

"Death in Venice" is a collection of eight of Thomas Mann's best short stories. Usually, I'm not really one for short stories, as most times I find myself hanging at the end and disappointed in the development of the plots and characters. I was not disappointed with this book.

Through his eight stories, Mann explores many aspects of human nature...most notably love. Each story has a different theme, but there is an underlying passion for life and meaningful relationships that fills each tale with beauty and a bittersweet longing. Topics in this collection range from a look at the world from the view of a young artist, a man's respect for the family pet that worships him, a stark look at an incestuous relationship between twins, a family trip to Venice gone awry, and many others.

My only difficulty is that the language used is a bit more obscure than most of us are used to. I hadn't realized how important commas were, and there usefulness was proven by the lack of them in Mann's work. Usage and structure was different at the time of these writings, however, and not much time is needed to adjust.

I would recommend "Death in Venice" to anyone who enjoys classic literature, or who enjoys reading the work of someone who is passionate about what they do and how they live. It is definitely worth the time invested.

Although he was to remember his friendship with painter Paul Ehrenberg as the love of his life, in 1905 he married Katia Pingsheim, who came from a well-to-do Munich Jewish family. He remained married to her until his death 50 years later. In marrying her, he sacrificed his natural inclinations for social convention.

Mann found very young men beautiful, but his homosexuality remained hidden for 50 years after his death, when his diaries were released. These revealed that he was prone to fits of nausea, nervous, trembling and convulsive sobbing quite at odds with his public image of elegant, self-assured aloofness. He was fortunate that the Nazis never discovered his secret. -BBC Education: Biography of Thomas Mann

The quote above is merely one of a number of similar sentiments that I found when I was looking for links for this review and I must admit, they completely mystify me. How could anyone read this story and not realize that Mann was an almost heroically repressed homosexual?

Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a German writer, who decides that he needs a holiday to relieve the stress of his "nerve-taxing" work. Eventually he arrives in Venice and conceives a passionate crush on a a fourteen year old boy named Tadzio. As he grows ever more obsessed with the boy, Aschenbach's mind becomes increasingly unbalanced. He takes to following the lad around and refuses to leave Venice despite an outbreak of cholera, virtually courting death in order to indulge his desires. Finally, as Tadzio frolics in the waves at the beach, Aschenbach dies quietly in a beach chair.

Just in case the reader hasn't gotten the hint, Mann helpfully provides Aschenbach one extended soliloquy:

For mark you, Phaedrus, beauty alone is both divine and visible; and so it is the sense way, the artist's way, little Phaedrus, to the spirit. But, now tell me, my dear boy, do you believe that such a man can ever attain wisdom and true manly worth, for whom the path to the spirit must lead through the senses? Or do you rather think-for I leave the point to you-that it is a path of perilous sweetness, a way of transgression, and must surely lead him who walks in it astray? For you know that we poets cannot walk the way of beauty without Eros as our companion and guide. We may be heroic after our fashion, disciplined warriors of our craft, yet are we all the women, for we exult in passion, and love is still our desire-our craving and our shame. And from this you will perceive that we poets can be neither wise nor worthy citizens. We must needs be wanton, must needs rove at large in the realm of feeling. Our magisterial style is all folly and pretence, our honourable repute a farce, the crowd's belief in us is merely laughable. And to teach youth, or the populace, by means of art is a dangerous practice and ought to be forbidden. For what good can an artist be as a teacher, when from his birth up he is headed direct for the pit? We may want to shun it and attain to honour in the world; but however we turn, it draws us still. So, then, since knowledge might destroy us, we will have none of it. For knowledge, Phaedrus, does not make him who possesses it dignified or austere. Knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store by form. It has compassion with the abyss-it is the abyss. So we reject it, firmly, and henceforward our concern shall be with beauty only. And by beauty we mean simplicity, largeness, and renewed severity of discipline; we mean a return to detachment and to form. But detachment, Phaedrus, and preoccupation with form lead to intoxication and desire, they may lead the noblest among us to frightful emotional excesses, which his own stern cult of the beautiful would make him the first to condemn. So they too, they too, lead to the bottomless pit. Yes, they lead us thither, I say, us who are poets-who by our natures are prone not to excellence but to excess.

Mann, who had studied and was influenced by Nietzsche, here posits the artist as a Dionysian, drawn to the purely sensual. But at the same time he recognizes that this attraction to the non-rational realm is self destructive; yield to desire and you end up, like Aschenbach, first insane and then dead. The artist is counterpoised against the wise and rational citizenery, whom Nietzsche termed Apollonians (see Orrin's review of The Birth of Tragedy (1872)(Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900) (Grade: C). I've tried several times to read Mann's novels--Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus--and I have to admit I find them unreadable, but supposedly this struggle between reason and passion is a consistent theme.

Yet when Mann's diaries were published in the 1980's--revealing a man who, despite a successful marriage lasting half a century and producing six children, was continually smitten with young men, typically the waiters in his favorite restaurants--the critics claim to have been shocked by the revelation of his homoerotic yearnings. Significantly, there is no evidence that he acted on these impulses. He appears to have submerged his carnal appetite for boys in favor of a conventional family life. I simply do not understand why this should have surprised anyone; it seems perfectly consistent with the vision of this story that he would have chosen not to end up like Aschenbach himself.

This is not a terribly enjoyable story to read and there aren't really any sympathetic characters. Nor do I find Mann's prose particularly compelling; as I mentioned, I've found his other works to be pretty tough sledding. But taken purely as a cautionary tale, it's at least mildly worthwhile reading.

GRADE: C

The incestuous love between Siegmund and Sieglinde in Thomas Mann's "The Blood of the Walsungs" is based on a self-centered narcissism. The twins love each other because each reminds the other of themselves: "They were very like each other, with the same slightly drooping nose, the same full lips lying softly together, the same prominent check-bones and black, bright eyes. Likest of all were their long slim hands, his no more masculine than hers . . ." Yet, their physical resemblance is just one aspect of their similarity.

Perhaps more important is the ennui they both share, made worse by the luxury that surrounds them ('Dinner clothes in the afternoon!' Sieglinde said, making a face. It isn't even human!'). Siegmund and Sieglinde suffer the woes of wealthy children: they have everything, yet that having everything become hated because it reminds them of their own emptiness -- that they have yet to achieve on their own. Trying something, like Siegmund's painting, can even be worse than doing nothing. Because trying and failing only confirms the dread that one doesn't deserve what one has.

It's no wonder the twins' inner fear and insecurity manifests as resentment, the desire for revenge, and attraction to one's mirror image. Resentment and revenge are projections of inner hatred, and attraction to one's double perhaps provides a desperate hope that each is not so bad since another is similar. And who best to understand one's inner turmoil but another who is virtually the same?

It is also not surprising the twins consummate their attraction after the opera. After all, what's more dramatic, heroic, and conducive to the surrendering of one's passion than Wagnarian opera? In thunder and storm anything goes, and perhaps all is forgiven. I'm surprised they didn't go at it right there in the opera box. But, such an atmosphere surely gave artistic backdrop to each's depressive self-loathing. In that arena, each could cease being themself and become heroic. How easy it must have been to ride that feeling all the way to the bedroom. And, illicit passion now gives each meaning. An affair is so much more than an affair; it's drama in which one is the central figure, just like the opera. Because of the resentment each had for Beckerath, they now too have a perfect foil, a villain in whom they can portray to each other all the vile characteristics Hunding possesses. In it's own sick way it all makes sense.

I wonder then, does each of us carry a little of that in the person we carry the torch for? Are we attracted to certain persons because they remind us of ourselves? Or who we wish to be? Or who we hope they will help us become? Or who we hope they see us as? Is love really that narcissistic or self-aggrandizing? Anybody else tempted to sleep with their brother or sister after a good opera?

In "Death in Venice," Mann crafts an exquisite portrait of "man as artist." Through the character of Aschenbach, Mann explores the artist's role in the public realm as well as his need for fulfillment in his private life. Using the character of Tadzio as a symbol of true artistic beauty, Mann weaves a love story that is at once both destructive and redemptive. This novella is painfully beautiful and hauntingly memorable -- a staggering accomplishment.