Death in Venice: And Seven Other Stories (Paperback)

by Thomas Mann (Author)
Key Phrases: Tonio Kroger, Herr Spinell, Herr Aarenhold (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Mann's bestselling work of fiction now appears in a trade paperback format with a striking new jacket. Sales of the classic have totaled over 800,000 copies and average 42,000 copies a year.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (March 13, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679722068
• ISBN-13: 978-0679722069
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #151,964 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction to Thomas Mann - Intriguing, Complex Stories, August 20, 2005

By	Michael Wischmeyer (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The long novels of Thomas Mann can prove challenging, not unlike those of Henry James. Fortunately, this varied collection - Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories - offers an easier way to become acquainted with Mann's intellectual, psychologically complex literature.

Thomas Mann's lengthy sentences and complex grammatical structures markedly complicate the task of translation. H. T. Lowe-Porter's translation is considered the most accessible version, although at the expense of subdividing many of Mann's sentences. (For comparison with an excellent literal version, look at Stanley Appelbaum's translation of Death in Venice, Dover Publications, 1995).

Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories was first published by Vintage Books in 1954. My edition was printed by Vintage International in 1989; it has neither an introduction nor explanatory notes.

Death in Venice (1911): While vacationing in Venice, the aging, highly respected author Gustave Ashenbach becomes mesmerized by a young boy staying at the seashore with his Polish aristocratic family. Although intellectually aware of his growing obsession, Ashenbach is unable to break away. This somber portrayal of a troubled man is a masterpiece of subtle nuances that illustrates Thomas Mann's ability to create layers of meaning.

Tonio Kroger (1903) is perhaps more biographical as it explores a writer's internal conflict between his desire to be accepted, that is to fit in to a bourgeois life, and his contradictory need to follow his artistic temperament wherever it might lead him.

Mario and the Magician (1929) is more explicitly political, depicting in the guise of an unscrupulous hypnotist a Mussolini-like character. The ending of this intriguing account is a surprise.

The setting in Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925) is Munich, less than a decade after World War I, amid rampant inflation and social upheaval. The narrator, Professor Cornelius, is saddened by the loss of tradition, exemplified by modern art, music, and dance forms so popular with his older children, now young adults. He finds refuge in his study of history. Early sorrow refers to an incident involving his five year-old daughter, Ellie.

A Man and His Dog (1918) is personal, humorous, and almost idyllic, quite different from the more serious topics addressed in the other stories in this collection.

The Blood of the Walsungs (1905) is the most disturbing story in this collection. The two key characters exhibit an aristocratic arrogance and elitism that culminates in incest. In an opera scene Mann draws a close parallel between his two protagonists and Siegmund and Sieglinde in Wagner's Die Walkure.

Tristan (1902) has been described as a retelling of the legend of Tristan and Isolde set in a sanatorium. Detlev Spinell, a tuberculosis patient staying in the Dr. Leander's medical facility, becomes infatuated with another patient, Herr Kloterjahn's wife. Spinell is a largely unsuccessful writer, one that has difficulty relating to others.

In Felix Krull (1911) the narrator is a self-serving, unscrupulous, amoral, confidence man that is somehow likeable. The story ends abruptly, leaving the reader wondering what happens next. Forty years later Thomas Mann resumed work on this story and in 1954 he published the novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, a light, often hilarious account of a man who wins the favor and love of others by enacting the roles that they desire of him.

Thomas Mann was born in Germany in 1875. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. He left Germany in 1933, living primarily in Switzerland and the United States until his death in 1955.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great introduction to reading Thomas Mann, November 27, 2001

By	Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

Thomas Mann may be an acquired taste in literature; he himself admitted that he had great difficulty knowing when to stop. Buddenbrooks, his autobiographically-based novel of a Northern German merchant family before WWI was supposed to be a short book of about 250 pages, like a Scandinavian novel. Well, it is far longer, and if you like Mann, you are glad of it.

However, tackling The Magic Mountain, with its long philosophical discourses, or other Mann novels is a lot easier if you begin with these short works. (Short is relative; Death in Venice was supposed to be a short story and ended up, predictably, a novella.) The themes in these works show up again in Mann's other writings; Tristan in particular, is a sketch for The Magic Mountain (thumbnail sketch, to be sure.) Tonio Kroger resembles Buddenbrooks in the autobiographical details and setting. The theme of sexual perversion and decadence heading to destruction (supposedly a metaphor for the society of pre-war Germany) appear in both Death in Venice and Blood of the Walsungs.

If you are new to Thomas Mann, these works are a wonderful place to start. If you grow to love his writing, re-reading these is always a pleasure.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The return of the repressed/Dionysos, February 7, 2001

By	TheIrrationalMan (Basildon, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

Aschenbach, an ageing, ascetic author makes up his mind to visit Venice in the hope of encountering "distant scenes". There he becomes wildly infatuated with a fourteen-year-old Polish boy, the Hyacinth of myth, named Tazio. The narrative centres around the fumbling and pathetic attempts made by the protagonist to address the object of his love, eventually resulting in the death of the aged Aschenbach. Mann seems interested in establishing parallels between Aschenbach's condition and the ideals of classical antiquity, as the substantial [mis]-quotations from Plato's "Phaedrus" make clear. However, the story lends itself to other interpretations, such as the asethetics of Nietzsche, with its duality of "Apollinism" and "Dionysism", of which Mann was a fervent disciple. Aschenbach's dignified, ordered, rational, harmonious, Apolline existence can be read as being ruptured by the irrational force of the Dionysian, the instinct of intoxication and self-destructive excess. Similarly, Mann's portrayal of Aschenbach's infatuation with Tazio can be interpreted along Freudian lines. What of the scene in which Aschenbach is set to leave Venice but loses his bags, then returns and it is only *after* the fact that he discovers the real reason for his return? This is clearly a dramatisation of what Freud terms neurosis, the conflict between an unconscious desire and a prohibitive command of the conscious. The elevated, detached, "objective" style shows Mann to have been committed to the classical paradigms of narrative and composition and, in this respect, he invites comparison with Flaubert.