Reviews

Death in Venice & a Man and His Dog: A Dual-Language Book by Thomas Mann

michellehogmire's review against another edition

4.0

Thomas Mann can write the hell out of a sentence--wrangling an entire being to life in a single paragraph through a careful combination of physical quirks, psychology, and past history--not to mention his mastery of plot, pacing, and intertextual references. All eight stories in this collection, however, don't hold equal weight. The unsettling mesh of doom and desire in "Death in Venice," the horror of "Mario and the Magician," and the subtle sadness of "Disorder and Early Sorrow" make all three classics of the form, with war looming in every background. "Tristan" and "The Blood of the Walsungs" are wonderfully strange, delving into themes of postpartum depression and incest. "Felix Krull" feels incomplete, so it makes sense that Mann sought to expand it. "Tonio Kroger" falls into the Jane Austen category for me--characters satirized so well that they become insufferable. And despite my love for puppies "A Man and His Dog" gets damn boring.