![]() ![]() (Don’t expect travel-writing.) There he encounters Tadzio, an adolescent Polish aristocrat holidaying with his family. At the storied Grand Hotel des Bains, he settles down for a mostly sedentary vacation of indeterminate length. ![]() His enthusiasm for work is flagging he embarks on a trip and ends up in Venice. Gustav von Aschenbach is a middle-aged writer who has accumulated fame and money, and recently the knighthood that’s given him his ‘von.’ He’s a bachelor, a solitary character with a disciplined life and a sensitive temperament: he needs a nap after his morning literary efforts (as Mann himself did). But the story at the heart of Venice is a poignant exploration of unrequited Uranian love the autobiographical germ that the novella is now known to have renders Death a valuable document for students of Mann’s life and work. Doege is ponderous and dense, almost unreadable in parts: aiming, apparently, to defy the constraints of the English language by transliterating endlessly long and involved sentences. Death in Venice is a very different novel: introspective, philosophical, and intertextual. I relished this portrait of a charming trickster in the big city, making his living by his wits and sex appeal Confessions is a fleet-footed study of its amoral protagonist. ![]() The first Mann novel I read, many years ago, was Confessions of Felix Krull. ![]()
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