Thomas Mann
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
Superb Translation of a Novella That Seamlessly Blends Obsession With Artistic Integrity 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 15 people found this review helpful.
An obsessive, unfulfilled passion is at the heart of Thomas Mann's classic 1912 novella, and Michael Henry Heim's 2003 translation liberates the homoerotic elements of Mann's sometimes dense prose to make the main character more accessible to contemporary readers. Heim succeeds in bringing the story out of the academic cobwebs. The plot is light on action, as it focuses squarely on middle-aged Prussian novelist Gustav von Aschenbach as he pursues his passion for Tadzio, a young Polish boy on vacation with his family in Venice. Past his peak as a successful writer and facing his fast-approaching mortality, von Aschenbach sees Tadzio as a symbol of his own faded youth and of attractions that were never made reality in his fifty-plus years. The writer is in the middle of a book about Frederick the Great when he arrives in the sweltering heat of Venice where there is an Asiatic cholera breakout.
Although the more literal interpretation of von Aschenbach's constant pursuit can be seen as wanton lust, the real undercurrent that Mann provides is the writer's self-validation as an artist. Toward that end, Mann has his protagonist look at Tadzio as an object of irreproachable beauty, something that fulfills his need to get reacquainted with his artistic integrity. Heim's translation allows the story to get past the titillation factor into what comes across almost like a ghost story given that von Aschenbach never touches or even speaks to Tadzio. There is a sense that something transcendent will occur toward the end, but it becomes a race against time to see if von Aschenbach's fever dream becomes tangible. Mann's struggles with his own sexuality are palpable on these pages, but so is his emotional distance from the character's passions. It's this concurrent dichotomy in perspective that makes this book a classic and not something to be relegated simply to the gay fiction shelves at the bookstore. Novelist Michael Cunningham ("The Hours", "Specimen Days") wrote the introduction to the 2003 Heim edition.
Editorial Review:
The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim
Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.
In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."
