incredibly atmospheric, heady, tonally consistent, holds together as a work of art most cohesively. ( )

Highly recommended to be read in the Norton Critical Edition. In this particular case, all of the supplementary material is quite worthwhile. Although the texts of Mann's notes to Death in Venice and of his essays and letters may seem at first a bit tedious, they become of interest when sometimes referenced in the critical essays, all of which are excellent. ( )

I need to read more Thomas Mann. ( )

In a word, ugh. A fifty-something year old man falls in love with an adolescent boy and obsessively follows him all over Venice. Venice is a wonderful and beautiful city, one of my favorite in the world, but here it is painted in an awful light, as a rank, stifling and disease-ridden cesspool. There is very little I liked about this book; even stylistically the short text is dense and not a fun read. Yes of course there is a deeper meaning and parallels in the old man trying to cling to a life which is fading and the once-glorious city prone to flooding and inevitably doomed, as well as the old man who has lived an intellectual life trying to discover passion, which many have commented on is a take on the Nietzsche duality in “The Birth of Tragedy”. But in a word, ugh.

Quotes:
On living life:
“He had therefore never known sloth, never known the carefree, laissez-faire attitude of youth. When he got sick in Vienna around the age of thirty-five, a canny observer remarked about him to friends, ‘You see, Aschenbach has always lived like this’ – and the speaker closed the fingers of his left hand into a fist – ‘never like this’ – and he let his open hand dangle comfortably from the arm of the chair. How right he was!”

On loneliness:
“A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions that others might shrug off with a glance, a laugh, or a brief conversation occupy him unduly, become profound in his silence, become significant, become experience, adventure, emotion. Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.” ( )