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3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
El tema principal es bastante controversial: Un hombre adulto se 'enamora' de la belleza de un adolescente de 14 años. No, no es un 'Lolita' pero con niño xD
Vayamos en orden. Aschenbach, es un escritor que ha sabido crecer en el círculo literario, sus libros han alcanzado cierto renombre, no tiene familia, solo vive para escribir.
Pero un día un encuentro fortuito cambia algo dentro de él y decide salir de su ciudad y buscar el descanso que necesita. Es ahí cuando cae en un hotel de Venecia y cruza caminos con Tadzio, un hermoso muchacho polaco que está de vacaciones con su familia.
¿Qué hace tan especial este libro? Aunque es una novela corta, el autor ha sabido abordar varios temas: La identidad de un artista, la moral de un hombre, la belleza como un concepto más que una virtud, la belleza como lugar de perdición, el envejecimiento y su decadencia...
Es una lectura bastante interesante, tiene su toque profundo y algo oscuro. Lo leí por primera vez hace unos 7 años y lo bueno de tener mala memoria es que no me acuerdo todo, después de esta nueva lectura he identificado que ciertos personajes no son solo elementos de narración, sino que representan ideas importantes que se desarrollan más adelante.
Si pudiera modificar algo, sería fusionar los dos primeros capítulos en uno solo, porque me pareció un poco largo; sin embargo esa primera parte es muy importante, porque cuando terminas el libro te das cuenta de todo lo que cambió en Aschenbach.
Vayamos en orden. Aschenbach, es un escritor que ha sabido crecer en el círculo literario, sus libros han alcanzado cierto renombre, no tiene familia, solo vive para escribir.
Pero un día un encuentro fortuito cambia algo dentro de él y decide salir de su ciudad y buscar el descanso que necesita. Es ahí cuando cae en un hotel de Venecia y cruza caminos con Tadzio, un hermoso muchacho polaco que está de vacaciones con su familia.
¿Qué hace tan especial este libro? Aunque es una novela corta, el autor ha sabido abordar varios temas: La identidad de un artista, la moral de un hombre, la belleza como un concepto más que una virtud, la belleza como lugar de perdición, el envejecimiento y su decadencia...
Es una lectura bastante interesante, tiene su toque profundo y algo oscuro. Lo leí por primera vez hace unos 7 años y lo bueno de tener mala memoria es que no me acuerdo todo, después de esta nueva lectura he identificado que ciertos personajes no son solo elementos de narración, sino que representan ideas importantes que se desarrollan más adelante.
Si pudiera modificar algo, sería fusionar los dos primeros capítulos en uno solo, porque me pareció un poco largo; sin embargo esa primera parte es muy importante, porque cuando terminas el libro te das cuenta de todo lo que cambió en Aschenbach.
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
There is something gross about the city in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Humid, odorous, and swampy—an air of pestilence defines Mann’s Venice. The novella is about ugliness as much as it is about beauty. It is defined by a dichotomy of the grotesque and its infiltrations of the beautiful.
On the boat, we receive Aschenbach’s first moment of disgust —a man “pretending” to be young. It’s not simply that he pretends to be young, but that he (as an older man) has surrounded himself with youths and genuinely believes himself to be among them. This uncanny vision of a drunk, shaking, licentious, imitative “young-old man” evokes a “dazed sense, as though things about him were just slightly losing their ordinary perspective, beginning to show a distortion that might merge into the grotesque.” Aschenbach’s disgust is at the imitation. He’s disgusted that old age believes it can capture a form of beauty only available to youth. This imitation, as seen in the quote, is a grotesque distortion of beauty. Aschenbach’s discomfort reads well next to Platonic discussions of the ideal. Why would an old man attempt to imitate youth/beauty when he should be learning to love it? It is not his place to be an object of desire (beloved), it is his place to be a lover. This narration, of course, becomes so obviously ironic after Aschenbach undergoes his transformation in the final chapter, which reveals his own distortion into grotesqueness.
Aschenbach’s disgust, of course, is not relegated to a discomfort of old age or imitation. In fact, anything or anyone who is not representative of an ideal of beauty is described as lacking. When he first encounters Tadzio, the book’s symbol of pure beauty and love, Aschenbach also describes his two young sisters. With “vacant expressions, like nuns” and “disfiguring austerity.” It is in his description of their unappealing sternness, that Tadzio’s beauty is unveiled and explored. As the narrator, it is not enough for Aschenbach to focus on Tadzio, everything is defined in contrast. “Real” youth is most real compared to the “fake” youth of the boat and “real” beauty becomes more beautiful when it is described next to the “plainness” of the girls. This is what I mean when I say this novella is defined by the dichotomy of the grotesque and its infiltrations of the beautiful—-beauty lives in conflict and comparisons to ugliness.
In the last two chapters Aschenbach, a near-perfect Apollonian character, is consumed by a sexual, Dionysian frenzy through the dreamscape. The dream, a bacchic orgy punctuated by drumbeats and “bestial degradation” reveals to Aschenbach the sexual desire he feels for the young boy. It is not a pure desire of the artist for beauty but something darker, uglier, and more visceral. The dream’s frenzy of “panting bodies…of wounds, uncleanness, and disease” aligns with the swelling wave of the plague in Venice. The city is engulfed in pestilence, death, and chaos. His already intense interest in the boy devolves into an all-consuming sexual obsession and he begins to noticeably follow and watch him. He drunkenly lays on the Polish family’s door, tracks the boy’s every move at the beach, and follows their gondola around the city. Aschenbach views the plague as an opportunity. In the ugliness of sickly chaos, he can act on his “ugly” desires. He imagines, in the chaos of the city, getting a moment alone with Tadzio and stealing him away. The way Aschenbach’s desires evolve seems to reject the Platonic ideal of desire as a pathway for the beautiful and good (as seen in the dialogue between Socrates and Diotima). Instead, his desire grows as death and sickness do—grotesquely, chaotically, and destructively. In Death in Venice ugliness is inextricable from beauty, from desire.
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I really wanted to love this, but it's so boring and long-winded and unnecessarily convoluted. Thomas Mann sees no reason to use one sentence if a chapter can do.
It would have been a good short story maybe? There were flashes of brilliance, granted. And plenty of heavy handed foreshadowing - although I presume the ending was never going to be a shock, given the title. But every time I'd get interested in something - a nasty gondolier, plague, the boy and his brittle teeth, some light stalking action - then there would be a load of inconsequential twaddle or a complete scene-change and abandonment to ruin it.
And like Love in the Time of Cholera - there's just not enough cholera. And then the Death in Venice, when it happens, is a sort of afterthought.
I only kept reading because it was so short and it's a Dirk Bogarde film. I'm now going to try that film and see if it manages to make a better job if this, because there's a decent story here, struggling to get out.
It would have been a good short story maybe? There were flashes of brilliance, granted. And plenty of heavy handed foreshadowing - although I presume the ending was never going to be a shock, given the title. But every time I'd get interested in something - a nasty gondolier, plague, the boy and his brittle teeth, some light stalking action - then there would be a load of inconsequential twaddle or a complete scene-change and abandonment to ruin it.
And like Love in the Time of Cholera - there's just not enough cholera. And then the Death in Venice, when it happens, is a sort of afterthought.
I only kept reading because it was so short and it's a Dirk Bogarde film. I'm now going to try that film and see if it manages to make a better job if this, because there's a decent story here, struggling to get out.