Product Description

"Death in Venice" is a story of obsession. Gustave von Aschenbach is a successful but ageing writer who travels to Venice for a holiday. One day, at dinner, Aschenbach notices an exceptionally beautiful young boy who is staying with his family in the same hotel. Soon his days begin to revolve around seeing this boy and he is too distracted to pay attention to the ominous rumours that have begun to circulate about disease spreading through the city.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15957 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

About the Author
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards he left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University of Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he recieved in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

Customer Reviews

A beautiful novella.
Death in Venice is an exquisite story; every word is carefully selected, every sentence is rich with meaning.
I studied this novella as part of a literature qualification, but it immediately became the best thing I have ever read; I can't recommend it enough. Thomas Mann's writing is poignant and absolutely stunning. If you have any preconceptions about the nature of the story, dismiss them, and read it anyway - it is definitely, as a previous review says, a masterpiece!

For any paragon of self-discipline
Mann draws a painful distinction between artistic beauty and the sensual, erotic beauty which underpins the protagonist's downfall. At the beginning of the narrative, a paragon of self-discipline, by the end this successful writer of wide European acclaim has become a slave to his passions. The exploration of aethetic rationalism (clearly evoked by Nietzsche)is shocking in its revelation of the deadly consequences of an extreme of either passion for the sensual or for the rational. A brilliant read - a masterpiece!

I am Der Bajazzo: I am Tonio Krueger
There. I admit it! I am the joker: I am Tonio Krueger. At times I am also Little Herr Friedemann, and Detlev Spinell and Gustav Aschenbach. Such is the psycological power of Thomas Mann to present the deepest insights of his protagonists. Each story is partly autobiographical and each story depicts love as seen from an outsider, sometimes fraught with pain, sometimes cosetted by tenderness.

These short stories - all from the early part of his career - will hopefully dig beneath your own preconceptions of what it means to be pained and rejected, and will therefore hopefully inspire you as it did me to be that little more charitable to fate and to unintentional cruelty.

A last word on style. Here you will see a craftsman at work where every word seems to have been examined in detail before being committed to paper. A joy to read. To use a (not wholly inappropriate) musical analogy, Thomas Mann is an author who embraces classic sonata or rondo forms, recapitulating words and phrases from earlier sections in a masterful way, and treats his themes to intense developments that provides immense satisfaction to this reader at least at the end of each story.