Death in Venice (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

It seems like a simple story. But yet it is heavily symbolic and its many translations from the original German have been analyzed by literature buffs since it was first published in 1912. The main character is Gustav von Aschenbach, an esteemed writer in his fifties with his own particular world view. The book is deep with meaning and symbolism. And every sentence which is written in beautiful prose has been analyzed and reanalyzed by scholars for almost a century. Gustav von Ashenbach takes a trip to Venice. Here, he is attracted to a young boy. Most of this short book consists of his thoughts about this boy. He never speaks to this boy but he follows him whenever he can and lusts for him, seeing him as an innocent thing of beauty. His passion takes over and he becomes quite ridiculous as he tries to make himself look younger. In the meantime, Venice is undergoing some sort of plague which the authorities try to hide from the people although rumors are flying. Gustav has a chance to warn the other guests in the hotel, including the boy's family, but his own inner thoughts seem to prevent him from speaking to them at all. The writing is beautiful and layered with the meaning of this one man's pursuit of beauty at the end of his life. It is all played out in elaborate early 19th century language and the author sure does know how to use his words. The reader gets to see his dreams, his hesitancy and his complicated thought process and I felt pure pleasure just letting my eyes move across the page and soak up the atmosphere the author created. Clearly, this is a work of art and has stood the test of time.

As with many translated works, one has to struggle to uncover the brilliance of the author's original masterpiece. This version has an overabundance of typographical errors and awkward English language renderings of the complex German sentence structures. Such obstacles and inconveniences to the reader add one more element of irony to this tale of obsession and consequent disintegration of the tidy, well-ordered little universe of the protagonist. The scenic backdrop, psychological probings, and unfolding of the dramatic incidents are powerfully combined to draw the reader ever more closely into the vortex. In this tale, the bejeweled city of Venice is a scary place to be.

Warning: this book is not safe for anyone made uncomfortable by pedophiles. It is well written but definitively a little disturbing in the end.

This is a story I've read any number of times since I first encountered in college, and I decided to try an audiobook this time around. Big mistake. I don't know what the problem was, but it felt like a wholly different book to me, and not one that I particularly enjoyed. Possibly it was the narrator, a number of people have expressed negative opinions on his work in their reviews. Possibly it's a different translation, but I see no indication of who the translator was, and I really don't have the energy to compare the audio and hard copy versions side-by-side. Bottom line: this didn't work for me. On the off chance that you don't know the story, writer Gustav von Aschenbach feels restless and takes himself off to Venice where he finds the weather oppressive, but the proximity of a young Polish boy enough to keep him in the city in spite of his health concerns. Much is made of Aschenbach's work ethic, his moral stance, his belief that will power will carry one through all troubles. And yet in a moment, all of his professional nobility is shattered by the appearance of a luminous boy, a perfect amalgam of Eros, Hyacinth, and whatever other gorgeous, mythic youth Aschenbach's besotted brain tosses up to explain away the experience of being utterly gobsmacked by desire. The irony here is so think you need waders. In the end, we're the only witnesses to Aschenbach's fall from grace, from the pedestal which he worked so hard to climb. We don't really know why he was so smitten, whether there was something in his past which made him susceptible to a beautiful boy. We see him tart his desire up as casual interest, fascination, as a desire to touch perfection, and as love, but by the end, he's become something he formerly scorned -- an old man trying to be a young one -- in order to be more attractive to Tadzio. It's difficult to watch, and yet impossible to look away from the trainwreck of Aschenbach's end. Though my favorite Mann story is The Blood of the Walsungs, Death in Venice will always hold a special place in my heart. I'm sorry the audiobook didn't stand up to the task.

Death in Venice is a chilling, cerebral, and beautifully rendered novella. An aging academic's Petrarchan fawning over a gilded youth in a city of supreme decadence, Mann's book seems to have prefigured Lolita as an examination of a deranged, if eloquent, man's search for the ideal beauty personified. It takes a while for things to get going, even in such a brief story, as we're asked to wade patiently through our (anti)-hero's convoluted theories and related philosophical rambling early on, but this ultimately lends some texture to his later unflagging hunt for the boy throughout Venice. As things get going and Mann starts to gun the narrative throttle (to some extent), we feel the suffocating reality of this cloistered, opulent, gradually decaying world. It is impossible to read this book and not feel the heat, smell the canals, and experience the perpetual sting of the protagonist's demented yearning. Definitely worth a read for any student of life or literature, or really anyone curious to take a peek into the abyss of an unsettled mind in an ostensibly peaceful place about to be rocked by misery.

I surrender. Having taught literature and read—and understood—many of the classics, I turned to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice thinking it would be a short (barely sixty pages) and pleasant sojourn into classic literature. But with great humility, I announce I am not intellectual enough to understand or appreciate this work. Mann, a Nobel Prize for Literature winner, tells of middle-age Professor Aschenbach’s infatuation with the fourteen-year-old boy Tadzio. This is a subject that normally would have infuriated me, that of what borders on pedophilia, but in the novel, Aschenbach’s admiration is from afar, and the reader senses it will be a tragic thing, making it a bit more palatable. Unfortunately, that story doesn’t begin until at least ten pages of this very short book is spent in the professor spouting viewpoints. I got totally lost in those viewpoints. Aschenbach is a scholar who ponders on Greek literature and art, and I’m not well-versed in those things enough to wade through long, long sentences about them. Once the story begins, the pace picks up, as the professor sees the boy, becomes fascinated, and tries to convince himself, apparently, that loving such a beautiful young creature is more a love of art than a sexual thing. I can say that writing these words just now gave me a bit better understanding of the work, but I can also say that casual readers will most likely be as bogged down as I. And this opinion comes from someone who adores the writings of Henry James, an author that many readers find plodding.

This classic novella lead to the production of a masterpiece movie in a later time. I was surprised at how short the original story was, yet was very pleased to see how much was packed in a short time. No spoilers here, just a mention of how well told is the tale of a soul bearing a private torture. Invoking compassion as well as insight, I came away with a greater understanding of a secret pain and with a renewed sense of compassion for something often overlooked in a very shallow world. Because of this insight I will now never take many things for granted, and will have a more compassionate look at people I think I know, or knew. For that I must say I am grateful and satisfied with my little purchase. RIP Thomas Mann x.

Thomas Mann’s novella about an accomplished author and his efforts to deal with midlife writer’s block has a few noteworthy observations about art and life and the author uses symbolism and Greek mythology effectively, but this work is hindered by a weak plot and awkward translations. One example of Mann’s thought-provoking observations involves the influence of the artist and concludes that “the trust the public places in us is highly ridiculous, education of the young through art something that should be forbidden. Because how can someone be a good teacher when he has an inborn drive towards the abyss?” My father, a highly respected high school and college teacher of art and art history disproves this conclusion. In any case, if the novel contained more of these assertions, I might understand how it has attained a certain level of literary prominence, but there are three elements of this book that are difficult to understand: 1. The protagonist’s infatuation and obsession with young Tadziu defies comprehension even though the author devotes most of the book to this endeavor. 2. It is also difficult to understand how a novel about an esteemed author, which contains many reflections on his life and his art, contains only three brief sentences about his family. There are not very many concise sentences in this novella, but the sentences about his family are three of them. 3. From the perspective of this reviewer, it is incomprehensible that this author won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.” ― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales This book is a warning to the reader and to artists, of the price paid for artistic success, and the hidden in the beauty of art, that is the center of culture but also the rejection of culture by the individual that is exploring new possibilities outside the shared reality of a society. this tension of a shared common view and the exploration of possibilities outside the norm tear the peace of one's soul or for dose of us who have no soul our minds. The displacement does not have to be great , it only takes one step to be standing at the edge of the abyss, for it to look back at you with all its fury, and enchantment. For art is the breaking of taboos, and the establishment of new ones, it is reimagining what we are as a group, bubble, culture. “Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to over fastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.” ― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales Gustav von Aschenbach the main character of the book is a famous writer, in his fifties; while walking past a cemetery, while observing the edifices and religious motifs, he reads “THEY ENTER THE HOUSE OF GOD” “THE ETERNAL LIGHT MAY SHINE UPON THEM” (the caps is the way the writer wrote the passages) he observes a wild looking foreigner with read hair this makes him fantasize of a wild kind of eden described in detail. there are three more encounters on his travels they all infer his dislocation from society his fear of the otherness within him, some like this one are obviously religious, others are more of societal and sexual in nature. Thomas Mann eloquently warns us of his intentions in a description of the writer. “What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion ---” ― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice And so he takes as by the hand into secret passion, the depravity of Gustav von Aschenbach. His very open fascination with a fourteen year old boy, that is staying in his hotel. He regards him, absorbs him with every look, escalating into obsession or as he sees it love. “For passion, like crime, is antithetical to the smooth operation and prosperity of day-to-day existence, and can only welcome every loosening of the fabric of society, every upheaval and disaster in the world, since it can vaguely hope to profit thereby. And so Aschenbach felt a morose satisfaction at the officially concealed goings-on in the dirty alleyways of Venice, that nasty secret which had merged with his own innermost secret and which he, too, was so intent on keeping “ Thomas Mann, Death in Venice Little by little this passion consumes him, and physically transforms him into one of his most disdained visions and makes him risk it all, as he falls deeper into visions of the other God. “But the dreamer was now with them, within them: he belonged to the stranger god. Yes, they were now his own self as they hurled themselves upon the animals, lacerating them, slaughtering them, devouring gobbets of steaming flesh, as they dropped to the trampled mossy ground for unbridled coupling, an offering to the god. And his soul savored the debauchery and delirium of doom.“ Thomas Mann, Death in Venice This a book laden with allusions to antiquity and rich in allegory and symbolism, no word is wasted, not a sentence is there fluf or just adorn, it is a masterpiece delivered powerfully and succinctly. This book was published in 1911 the world is silently spinning into an abyss of death and destruction unbenounced to all its contemporaries, but here you can feel, almost a premonition a warning, of a malaise a stink in the middle of the best of civilization.

Despite the fame of this work, I fould it really quite boring: the first 25 pages were devoted solely to the thoughts of the protagonist before he had even decided to go to Venice. Also this edition had many - and I mean many - spelling mistakes, which adds to the disapppointment of the book.

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Top! Fast delivery. Good Job.

The edition looks like a printout from a website. No copyright mentions for the translator - Kenneth Burke - not even sure if he is aware of it. The indication ‘premium annotated edition’ is insulting.