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Title: " Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, David Luke ISBN: 0-436-26662-8 Publisher: Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: 08 October, 1990 Format: Hardcover |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Art as a way of life
Comment: This collection of Thomas Mann's novellas and short stories thematically exhibits the alienation of being a passionate artist in a bourgeois society. "We artists despise no one more than the dilettante, the man of life who thinks that in his spare time, on top of everything else, he can become an artist," the title character tells a sympathetic friend in "Tonio Kroger," a story which seems at least partially autobiographical. Tonio, who has become a renowned writer as an adult, recalls an instance when he was a boy in which he tried to entice the interest of a friend -- a popular, athletic boy, everything that Tonio was not -- by enthusiastically explaining to him the plot of Schiller's "Don Carlos." The attempt was futile, however, and Tonio was left spiritually alone with his unusual love of literature.
"Tristan" takes the artist-bourgeois conflict to a setting that presages Mann's definitive novel "The Magic Mountain." The protagonist, an offbeat writer named Spinell confined to a tuberculosis sanatarium, takes an interest in a fellow patient, a businessman's wife who, he discovers, is a sensitive and tasteful amateur pianist. He writes her husband a derogatory letter, deploring him as a philistine who does not deserve to share his life with this secretly artistic woman, which results in a heated confrontation between the two men. In "The Child Prodigy," Mann's tone turns satirical as he focuses on an eight-year-old concert pianist giving an electrifying public performance to an audience whose various reactions -- wonder, jealousy, indifference -- are reflections upon themselves more so than on the performer.
"Death in Venice" is the boldest piece in this collection, unambiguously presenting homosexuality in an artistically positive light but also showing something of a German fascination with Italian culture and scenery. Gustav Aschenbach, the protagonist, again seems to reflect Mann to an extent as a middle-aged, widowed, respected author from Munich who becomes infatuated with a teenage boy while vacationing in Venice. Whether this love ever becomes mutual or physical is not as important as the mood Mann invokes about European cultural and moral decadence, possibly symbolized by the cholera epidemic that sweeps through the city.
"Man and Dog: An Idyll" is a brilliant meditation on the narrator's affectionate and occasionally difficult relationship with his pet pointer and also allows a glimpse of life in the industrialized and suburbanized Germany of the early twentieth century. To say that Mann gives the dog a human personality may seem a cliche, but few writers could achieve his level of empathy in relating a dog's behavior and desires in man's terms without resorting to outright personification. A disturbing inversion of this story is told in "Tobias Mindernickel," in which a lonely old man, given no personal background by Mann, ostracized in his neighborhood by adults and taunted by children, buys a dog and demands from it the obedience and respect he has never earned from people.
Mann is truly one of the most important figures in twentieth century literature. What he chose to portray, and the talent with which he portrayed it, brighten the legacy of a century that threatened to destroy art in so many ways for so many insane reasons.
Rating: 5
Summary: Art and Time in Italy
Comment: The shorter tales are good but are really like imperfect sketches made in study for the grand finale piece Death in Venice. Most of the tales deal with sensual longing which is never satisfied or consummated and that gets a bit tiring unless you see the sensual longing representing some higher longing as well, the sensual longing perhaps being one in the same with spiritual and artistic longing. That way you are more in the frame of mind to see that Death in Venice is not just about an older mans lust for a younger man but a prolonged meditation about time and art and all those highly valued goods. I have to confess I get tired of Mann pretty quick because he dwells on the same themes over and over again but if you are a student of fiction he really is one of those writers who has much to teach. Still it sometimes seems to me that Mann's characters would be better off if they occasionally just went ahead and did it. That may sound to be an awful oversimplification but I think they would feel better and their already instable identities and worlds would not constantly be shaken to the ground by those too long suppressed desires. As for the spirit and artistic sense, they too would be happier, much more contented, with the occasional release and renewal of energies, a bit of fleshen contact would connect them to something more real than their "thoughts" about things. Anyway if you haven't already read Death in Venice you are lucky because it is a great read, though a strange and sometimes disturbed one. If you like your main characters made of more earthy substance than Mann's suffering spirits read D.H. Lawrence who also loved Italy by the way and who contemplated time and art in a much more relaxed manner.
Rating: 5
Summary: Greats Work of Short Fiction
Comment: This collection of Thomas Mann's early short works presents one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century in an expert and fluent translation, unbowdlerized.The title story, Death in Venice, is an example of lush late Romanticism in its most extravagent and vivid form. Mann, as always, dramatizes the tension between the bourgeois life of strict propriety, symbolized by the renowned Gustav Aschenbach, the protagonist, a literary titan specializing in learned tomes, and the seductions of art and beauty as symbolized by Venice and Tadzio, the focus of Aschenbach's fatal obsession. Some might find the description of the dissolution and its content as repugnant. But if you allow yourself to visualize the words as written and at least allow yourself to feel something of what Aschenbach is feeling, you will be transported outside of yourself strangely and hauntingly .The other stories, including Tonio Kroger, an earlier work that brought Mann great renown after the publication of Buddenbrooks, his first novel, are also wonderful examples of how the tensions of art and life, growing up and thinking affect their main characters. Not to be ignored is the sexual tension that pervades all of Mann's work and is deeply embedded in his consciousness. (I highly recommend Anthony Heilbut's critical biography of Mann for an understanding of the man, his work and the context of German life, literature and history in which it was written.)
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Title: Elective Affinities (Penguin Classics) by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, R.J. Hollingdale ISBN: 0140442421 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1978 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Five Women (Verba Mundi) by Robert Musil, Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, Frank Kermode ISBN: 1567920756 Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher Pub. Date: 01 July, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ISBN: 0345310020 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1984 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Madame Bovary (Bantam Classics) by Gustave Flaubert ISBN: 0553213415 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 July, 1982 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis, Christopher Prendergast ISBN: 067003245X Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 11 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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