Take a photo of a barcode or cover
j_ata 's review for:
Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
Oh, the lies we will tell ourselves to avoid confronting the actual nature of our desires! And the extent we'll go to maintain our most cherished delusions.
Aschenbach has fastidiously, rather prissily, spent his life carefully suppressing the messier aspects of living—& his sexuality as well, it seems—until chaos inevitably reasserts itself. Mann's depiction of the tangled web of aesthetic appreciation & sexual attraction is fascinating & I can think of few better depictions of the experience of being completely unraveled by desire; that the catalyst is a beautiful underrage boy remains both incredibly uncomfortable & queasily provocative.
I struggled a bit with my first reading of this years ago, & was advised to revisit with a different translation. Indeed: it made all the difference. Tried the new one by Damion Searls but stylistically it's too contemporary for my tastes—for an author like Mann I want a sense of the antiquated patina to be retained. Heim's elegant rendering is stunning & delivered exactly that.
"He was more beautiful than words can convey, and Aschenbach felt acutely, as he had often felt before, that language can only praise physical beauty, not reproduce it."
Aschenbach has fastidiously, rather prissily, spent his life carefully suppressing the messier aspects of living—& his sexuality as well, it seems—until chaos inevitably reasserts itself. Mann's depiction of the tangled web of aesthetic appreciation & sexual attraction is fascinating & I can think of few better depictions of the experience of being completely unraveled by desire; that the catalyst is a beautiful underrage boy remains both incredibly uncomfortable & queasily provocative.
I struggled a bit with my first reading of this years ago, & was advised to revisit with a different translation. Indeed: it made all the difference. Tried the new one by Damion Searls but stylistically it's too contemporary for my tastes—for an author like Mann I want a sense of the antiquated patina to be retained. Heim's elegant rendering is stunning & delivered exactly that.
"He was more beautiful than words can convey, and Aschenbach felt acutely, as he had often felt before, that language can only praise physical beauty, not reproduce it."