Customer Reviews

Death in Venice and Other Tales

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I can't imagine how difficult it must be to translate a writer so steeped in his original language as is Thomas Mann. "Death in Venice" and the other stories in this collection are great period - no matter what the language, the ideas and characters stand on their own. What makes this translation so much better is the attention Neugroschel gives to giving us prose that is as good as Mann's original German - this writing is simply beautiful; evocative of the period in which it was originally written without sounding like a joke or a bad imitation of turn of the century fiction. (It's no Henry James satire). Neugroschel has won the PEN/Faulkner award three times for his translations and it's easy to see why. Read his introduction where he talks about Mann's ability to "both evoke and to distance" and how he [Neugroschel] set about translating this feeling into English. This is truly the very best that a translation can be.

I don't think that Death in Venice operates on the premise that a "life of sensation" is worthwhile, whatever the cost. Mann's story is a complication of the traditional morality tale, and Aschenbach's demise is not a result of his giving in to the pursuit of beauty and visceral experience, but of his previous, total rejection of this kind of surrender. Aschenbach, we are told, lives like a "closed fist," and for this reason is completely unequipped to deal with the combined experience of visiting an unfamiliar and sinister place, and of encountering a boy who provokes a strong physical and emotional response (on a sidenote, occasionally I hear someone label this as a homophobic text, but they are entirely missing the point, I think. As in Henry James's Daisy Miller, Death in Venice, on one level, illustrates the way that forces outside of sex can make sex, or the desire for sex, fatal. It has nothing to do with the act, or desire, itself). It is Aschenbach's perpetual need to take the proverbial "high road" that makes his foray into the world of the sensual so disastrous.
The story is brilliant. Not only does Mann address wonderful themes like the nature of art, artistic impulse, desire, repression, and Orientalism, even, but the writing and narrative trajectory are flawless.

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.

Thomas Mann was one of the most elegant writers of our century. His prose dances off the page with a fluidity that is all too rare in today's world of literature, and his narrative style is always compelling. This little volume is a collection of twelve short stories. For the most part, the stories are enjoyable, though a couple of them are downright disturbing. Many of them feature dejected and misunderstood people who are desperately struggling to be understood and accepted in the world, and a great deal of the main characters are artists.

But there is much more here than just stories. In fact, nearly all these tales contain deep and complicated questions. What is art? What constitutes legitimate art? Is it true that true art brings pain, and that true artists can never live or enjoy life? These and many other questions are considered throughout this work.

As I said, some of these stories are a bit disturbing, and a couple are downright creepy. I recommend proceeding with caution. It might even be best to start with one of Mann's novels (like Buddenbrooks, for example). Still, if you are willing to brave this one out, it promises to be a richly rewarding experience, both in its quality of narrative and in the message that each of these short tales is meant to convey.

In a new translation, Joachim Neugroschel presents a generous selection of Thomas Mann's stories. In addition to the title story, he has included such classic tales as "Tonio Kroger," "Tristan," and "Blood of the Walsungs." The collection is a wonderful introduction to some of the great themes, such as love and death, and art and death, which Mann develops in his full length novels Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. The prevailing theme is the concept of the artist as exile. Set against the background of turn-of-the-century Germany, the stories are rich in the details of life in that era, and shadowed by the weakness and corruption that suggest a society that is in moral and economic decline. The translation, far from ideal, is peppered with some contemporary English that detracts a bit from the charm of the old and old-fashioned versions.

"Death in Venice" is so many wondrous treasures. It is the sound of a great heart breaking. And the search for beauty which is the sensuous pathway to something beyond us that enriches and restores. It is the aloof serene study of regalness and Tadzio who is blessed or cursed with being more than the other boys.. It is a soft claret smile in the middle of autumn harvest. It is the need to find direction to something more than stasis. It is sublime and fine. It is thoughtful and singing, as it gets inside the bones, as it soars above a world of plague and access denied. It is about giving up everything, literally, to watch a godling on the shore point the way to heaven. Tadzio and Von Aschenbach share so much in simply only their gazes at each other. A tossing of soft words inside. All that is needed.. The heart that does not want to touch too closely to beauty of Tadzio, or Tadzio touching too closely to beauty of himself. For it would spoil the romance. It would make of their shared unknown secret all the drowsy leaves cleared from the beaches of one's youth, denying the presaging of one's age, and saying everything is in a straight line. Cause and effect are all. Which is not so.

"Death in Venice," with no sexual passages, has supreme sexuality. Sensuousness. Delirious feasts at the molten center of everything. It is a sinecure that was struck into a prosaic world in the early part of the last century. It is sun umbrellas and long dining halls and eyes secretly turned toward the only reason for life, and mist and dank smelling Venice canals. It is doom messenger and prognosticator of the stars that seem to have been residing in a timeless golden boy all along, stirring inside himself, he not knowing how to handle it, other than to be a young frail god come from the sea, housed in perfection that is flawed only by poor teeth that Von Aschenbach notes means the boy shall not

live long, and there is shameful comfort for the man in that. "Death in Venice" is the pure sweet long note of love, the kind that Von Aschenbach has been using to call down through his life, even when he did not know the ultimate poetry in him was to reside in this last hope, cast as a sun bronzed boy beamed into the existence
of a man who remembers, in a newly familiar way, his own childhood, and stirs the flames of it, making it complete somehow, at long last.

Von Aschenbach, sitting in a beach chair, alone, so close to Tadzio, alone, and writing of beauty, of Greek myths, of a lad loved by jealous gods, of all the magicality that a mind in limbo, in tiredness of selling his early talent to be packaged in boxes, now sees this boy inside his own mind, sees the fine clean limbs, the perfect arrangement of them in standing and walking and being, the proud head of Tadzio turned just so, sees all those dreams which he tempered and denied and flattened and hid and thought the worth of a man was in what he could twist into something that was not. Von Aschenbach, so musing that the reading public should not know what goes into creation of a work, of this man lost in delirium, in the need to remake his life, to paint himself up with wax and curled hair and the unnecessary beads, like those of that mad clown who he has seen so terribly terrifyingly up close. And in cholera ridden Venice, he comes to death as he did once to life. With forlorn joy. To press his head against Tadzio's closed room door. To warn, if he could, the boy never to smile at him or anyone that smile that is of a lad looking into his own forest well of the ultimate sun. To strain the wings of eternity and to rush to it willingly, renouncing fog and dense conjecture left on a far horizon like a black cloud brackish and unwanted ever again

"Death in Venice" is precise, mystical, dizzying in its complexities. The stately comely song of man and it comes out giddy and filled with opera and huzzahs and such bleeding sadness that it has taken this long for Von Aschenbach to piece together the strands and mosaics that he knew all along, all this time, without knowing. It is presentment and miracle. It is Thomas Mann's grandiloquent usage of the words that heads devise and that hearts hold in trust. There is much in Tadzio and Von Aschenbach that compliment each other. Artistically. Beatifically. Angelically. Tadzio, out of his time, on the wrong planet, fought with by another boy, his servant, tossed to the ground, this godlet, by the boy who must hate him for a million known and unknown reasons. Then giving Tadzio mercy and letting him free, so Tadzio might do the same for Von Aschenbach. The boy of Von Aschenbach's conch shell corridors shows the man what Tadzio might not understand at all, that he is the pathway of a God in some other place unknown before by anyone, and still unknown, a more than human song pointing the way for Von Aschenbach out of life into a tomorrow of sleep and comfort, and home to a dying man, where one might need never fear and be unsure or have to explain himself to covert eyes that would never even try to understand, ever again.. Do they then touch, in another land less convoluted, with no sickness scourging? Yes! Gold calls to gold and the beloved, Mann writes, is less a being of wisdom and desire, than the one who beloves him. Reality trembles and a great slow sepia colored afternoon of late massively hot summer in a place strange and faraway thus dies.

Joachim Neugroschel, a PEN award winning translator, offers an intelligent introduction into why previous T. Mann translations have been unsatisfactory and do not suggest the sensual, sexual nature of the writings--at least in the short works. Here are 12 short works in total--a number of which I read in college (and saw the movie D I V with Dirk Bogarde). Finally, I get the point of them all. If you give the often baroque nature of Mann's prose a chance, you'll delve into some of the most prescient observations of the 'outsider' in society, and Mann usually makes the outsider an artist. Many characters--whether they are young, like Tonio Kruger, or older like the protagonist in DIV, battle with the sensual, sexual, and intellectural natures of their psyche. Of course, no aspect of the human wins out, and that's probably true in real life as well. I also had an epiphanic moment when I realized Thomas Mann's stories have very similar themes to the films of Woody Allen! Huh! Wait. It's obvious to me. The stories revolve around an anxious, neurotic, creative type living fairly comfortably in the material world, but finding something missing within, and realizing personal accomplishment doesn't make you happy. Additionally, W. Allen's main protagonists are almost always artists-writers, screenwriters, TV writers, doc. film producers, painters, etc. The same goes for Mann whose characters are artists, failed artists, or confused philosophers. Characters are given to broad philosophical reflection that at first seems to help them solve eternal problems only to find out that those reflections were probably PART of the problem. The various cities Mann's character inhabit or visit are also cosmopolitan for the most part, and the people that populate these locales are given to discussing relationships, the meaning of life, and the absurdity of day to day existence. But if you like at least some of Woody Allen's art, you should like these stories. I think you'll agree.

These stories are all very fine. However, I found this translation lacking some kind of esthetic satisfaction that I always get from an earlier translation of Mann's work by Helen T. Porter.

Death in Venice is one of the gratest and most intelectually stimulating books i have ever read. It gives an example of the impoartance of beauty to the human soul. Without beauty there is no reason to live but in the deep lust for beauty the subject is consumed and dies. It askes the question is life without beauty worth living especially if life without beauty is only half a life. Death in Venice is one of the only books, along with The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, that recognises this idea and shows us that a life of sensation may not be so wrong even if it may ultimately costs life but what is life without beauty. It is the subject of all artists as Keats said "beauty is truth and truth beauty" Byron's life of excess caused his exile and what stands on the lips of literary history are the words "all art is immoral" spoken by Oscar Wilde who's entire life was for beauty. Death in Venice is in proud tradition of the celebration of beauty even if beauty is a cause of destrucion.

The architecture, art, light, water and variety of each which one encounters in Venice are mind expanding. The magical qualities of the streets and waterways of the city can not be easily ignored.

And yet Mann's protagonist, Aschenbach, manages to.

This, it seems to me, is the most significant point of the story. Aschenbach, we learn, has lived a highly structured and productive existance, determined to impose order. He falls apart in Venice.

We are told at the beginning of Death in Venice that Aschenbach has been a diciplined producer of order and reason. However, what we witness through the following pages is a man reduced to obsessive observation and incapable of taking action. His compulsive fascination with the fourteen year old boy and his complete inability to save himself or even warn others foreshadows his diminuation.

From the moment when he glimpses the poser in the yellow suit and panama hat on the boat carrying him toward Venice, Aschenbach is drawn into a impotent struggle with all which surrounds him. His pointless dispute with the gondolier and his aimless wandering though the city in unconsumate pursuit of the polish youth resembles the futile actions of Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock.

The plague which destroys him comes from within. One short ferry ride, one taste of passion, one hint of forbidden fruit, and he crumbles. Aschenbach can live with reason; even the possibility of passion overwhelms him.

I read Death in Venice after years of hearing about it. It was worth the wait. It is a book which leaves an impression on the reader.