I've never quite been on board with high modernism. No one is ever allowed to just feel something, every aspect of our emotional lives has to be treated with a great deal of gravity and earnestness. I can relate to the sudden desire to travel, to escape, to experience the exotic, but it's just as often a passing fancy as some profound shift that needs to be explored in depth. And while the urge may be prompted by the sign of a funny-looking red headed dude, I tend to think it's been percolating through my subconscious for a while and this is the moment that it reaches the conscious. It doesn't match my own experience that the sight of someone beautiful could suddenly reveal something that was dormant for so long.

Nevertheless, there is still plenty to enjoy in this short book. Mann's brutal description of Gustav Aschenbach is compelling and is so obviously a disgusted assessment of the author's own worst characteristics that it's heart-wrenching and appalling at the same time. The prose shines in the sections where the action is unfolding or Aschenbach is undergoing some character development, but there are some sections where nothing seems to happen, even on the most abstract level and the prose is somewhat murky and dull.

Summary: If you love reading about exaltation, you're going to love Death in Venice. ( )

Un compositor envejecido y fatigado descubre, en medio de la decadente belleza veneciana, el espontáneo atractivo de un angelical adolescente.

Gustav von Aschenbach, en disciplinerad diktare med höga ideal, far på semester till Venedig. Där blir han oemotståndligt tjusad av en vacker fjortonårig pojke. Hans personliga förfall och lystenhet tilltar i takt med en epidemi som grasserar i staden.

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 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. ( )

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 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. ( )