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A review by lectoribenevolo
Death in Venice: And Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann
5.0
A magnificent collection of Thomas Mann’s shorter fiction, many of which are also to be found in the longer collection Stories of Three Decades. Here, we see Mann exploring themes which recur often in his work: the artist suspended in the tension between bourgeois respectability and passionate abandon, between detached form and dissolution; the voluptuous attraction of the South (Italy) and of the East; the paradoxically humanizing and dehumanizing nature of illness; the Faustian bargain brought about by deliberate transgression of social norms.
I keep coming back to read Thomas Mann because I never quite feel like I understand what he means for me to take away from his fiction. The more I read, though, the more I feel like some of the gaps fill in for me. The closest parallel I can find for Mann as an author is Charles Dickens: his fiction always, even at its darkest, maintains a certain human sympathy with it characters, and it tries to chart out, in broad strokes, the spiritual geography of early 20th-century Europe. He’s too enamored of his characters and their lives to press them in service of a simplistic agenda, which makes him pretty fascinating to read at length.
This collection contains the following stories, for each of which I give a one-sentence comment:
“Death in Venice” (1911): The most deliberately artful and restrained work of Mann’s I know.
“Tonio Kroger” (1903): Could have been titled “A Portrait of Gustave von Aschenbach as a Young Man.”
“Mario and the Magician” (1929): If this wasn’t meant to be an unforgettable portrait of Italian Fascism and authoritarianism, I will eat my hat.
“Disorder and Early Sorrow” (1925): A tale of bourgeois tenderness amidst the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic.
“A Man and His Dog” (1918): On the surface a genial exploration of dog ownership; beneath the surface, an exploration of one of Mann’s favorite themes, that of living on the edge of nature and its powers of dissolution and death.
“The Blood of the Walsungs” (1905): An incredibly disturbing story of incest and (beneath the surface) the existence of assimilated Jews in early 20th-century Europe, largely suppressed from publication during the author’s lifetime (probably due to strong resemblances between the story and his wife’s family).
“Tristan” (1902): A short depiction of art and life colliding in a sanatorium, which has strong parallels with the subplot in The Magic Mountain involving Clavdia Chauchat and Mynheer Peeperkorn.
“Felix Krull” (1911): An initial sketch for what later became the novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, and it feels incomplete for that reason.
I keep coming back to read Thomas Mann because I never quite feel like I understand what he means for me to take away from his fiction. The more I read, though, the more I feel like some of the gaps fill in for me. The closest parallel I can find for Mann as an author is Charles Dickens: his fiction always, even at its darkest, maintains a certain human sympathy with it characters, and it tries to chart out, in broad strokes, the spiritual geography of early 20th-century Europe. He’s too enamored of his characters and their lives to press them in service of a simplistic agenda, which makes him pretty fascinating to read at length.
This collection contains the following stories, for each of which I give a one-sentence comment:
“Death in Venice” (1911): The most deliberately artful and restrained work of Mann’s I know.
“Tonio Kroger” (1903): Could have been titled “A Portrait of Gustave von Aschenbach as a Young Man.”
“Mario and the Magician” (1929): If this wasn’t meant to be an unforgettable portrait of Italian Fascism and authoritarianism, I will eat my hat.
“Disorder and Early Sorrow” (1925): A tale of bourgeois tenderness amidst the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic.
“A Man and His Dog” (1918): On the surface a genial exploration of dog ownership; beneath the surface, an exploration of one of Mann’s favorite themes, that of living on the edge of nature and its powers of dissolution and death.
“The Blood of the Walsungs” (1905): An incredibly disturbing story of incest and (beneath the surface) the existence of assimilated Jews in early 20th-century Europe, largely suppressed from publication during the author’s lifetime (probably due to strong resemblances between the story and his wife’s family).
“Tristan” (1902): A short depiction of art and life colliding in a sanatorium, which has strong parallels with the subplot in The Magic Mountain involving Clavdia Chauchat and Mynheer Peeperkorn.
“Felix Krull” (1911): An initial sketch for what later became the novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, and it feels incomplete for that reason.