About this title: In DEATH IN VENICE, an elderly, famous, and wealthy writer named Aschenbach goes on vacation. He becomes fascinated with Tadzio, a young teenager who is staying with his family at Aschenbach's hotel. As his obsession grows, and despite warnings that a plague is threatening Venice, Aschenbach remains at the hotel hoping to make a connection with ...
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
Date Published: 1971
ISBN-13:9780140010824ISBN:0140010823
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. One reading crease on spine. NO chipping. Hardly noticeable. Minor rubbing on corners of spine. Text is mildly tanned but free of marks. Binding is tight. 191 p. 191pp; Glued binding read more
Description: Very Good. 0486287149 Copy has been read but remains in nice & clean condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or high-lighting. Spine is tight; a clean read. Some wrinkling to the cover and edges of the pages. Interior of book is in great condition. read more
Description: Very Good. 0486287149 Copy has been read but remains in nice & clean condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or high-lighting. Spine is tight; a clean read. Some shelf wear and wrinkling to the cover and edges of the book. Interior of book is in great condition. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780141181738ISBN:0141181737
Description: Acceptable. A readable copy. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (the dust cover may be missing). Pages can include considerable notes-in pen or highlighter-but the notes cannot obscure the text. ******PLEASE NOTE****** Orders placed after Dec. 7 cannot be guaranteed delivery before Christmas unless you select EXPEDITED shipping! Thank you & Happy Holidays! read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Dover Publications
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780486287140ISBN:0486287149
Description: A good reading copy only. Previous owners name inscribed inside front. May have notations, underlining or highlighting throughout. Book has tanning or browning due to normal aging process. -, Trade PaperBack, Good / read more
"I bet someone could write a masterpiece by taking this book's premise and elongating it into a fuller exploration of the child-adult love taboo. Oh, really? Oh.
This book really does read like a Lolita written 40 years prior with Lo's gender switched and a premature ending just before things get really interesting (if you know what I mean). Death in Venice is equally engrossing and sports a protagonist, Aschenbach, who's as well developed, far more relatable, and nearly as interesting as our dear Humbert Humbert. The novel does feel cut-off though, as if Mann were afraid to explore the tale any further, and it also includes a not-so-faint whiff of moralizing that's rather absent in Nabokov's version. Aschenbach's portrayal as a driven, successful, and now weary late middle-aged writer is so convincing that I was surprised to learn that Mann wrote this in his mid-30s. The characterization's so good, in fact, that I was sure it had to be mostly autobiographical. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it's damn good writing that's on display for too few pages. I'll be returning to Mann, and hopefully soon."
USELESS INFORMATION I stayed up till 3:30 in the morning reading it. When I first read the first few pages I thought this was going to be like The Virgin Suicides (one of my favorite novels)
THE STORY Author Gustave von Aschenbach took a trip to Venice but boy howdy, was he in the wrong place at the wrong time! He began to get obssessed with another guest at his hotel, a fourteen-year old boy named Tadzio. He first stared at him. Then von Aschenbach realized that he fell in love with Tadzio. Then he started following Tadzio when the latter and his family toured the city of Venice. The author then noticed there weren't that many tourists around. He began smelling a strange and sweet smell everywhere; it was disinfectant. A British travel agent told von Aschenbach that there was an outbreak of Asiatic cholera in Venice. City officials were denying it, because they didn't want to lose visitors. But people were dying right and left... Von Aschenbach died (presumably of the cholera) after watching the object of his lust for the last time tussling with this other boy, on the beach. He died without ever talking to Tadzio, let alone telling him how he felt.
WATCH OUT for references to Greek gods (Apollo, Eros, etc.) and red-haired men. And mouth. When describing his characters, Mann always described the mouth. When following Tadzio for the last time, von Aschenbach also ate strawberries...Rotten strawberries??
THE VERDICT 1. The language is beautiful. 2. I would be happy to give Death in Venice another shiny star or two if a thing or two happened. But nothing happened! Von Aschenbach never even talked to Tadzio. So...it's good. But not scrumtulescent."
"I liked and disliked this book. Mann has his character, Aschenbach, preach a little more than I like, preaching his thoughts about beauty and writing and control. That's what I disliked. For the first third of the book, I could barely force myself to keep reading.
Then Aschenbach falls in love and begins to tail the object of his affection all over Venice. The story takes a different turn and the writing moves from a rant about virtue to a real story. Venice is beautifully depicted and Aschenbach becomes a real, brilliant, tortured human being. That's what I liked."
"What are we faced with here? A writer, Aschenbach, past 50 years of age, apparently with a degree of renown, driven and obsessed, tiring, feeling the need of a break or a rejuvenation, sees a young man from afar near a cemetery and experiences a burst of wanderlust, a vision of something different in his life, and decides on a month's vacation somewhere different from his usual summer retreat in the mountains. We know nothing of what kind of writing the protagonist does, nothing of the significance of this particular young man.
Aschenbach's literary accomplishments are chronicled, and he turns out to be a genuine man of letters, having written extensively and authoritatively in a number of different genres. "His entire being was geared to fame." There seems to be a stoici quality about his life and approach to his art, a fierceness with dignity that perseveres despite all obstacles and repeatedly triumphs, an intensity that ignores all personal discomfort, indeed a grimness in the face of all challenges. His art conceals an inner weakness with solid and undaunted surface overlying a disintegrating core. How much of this picture is autobiographical, one wonders. At any rate, this art appealed to the spirit of his age, to the many who succeeded despite and in the face of exhaustion and despair, again, a stoic picture. With his aging and artistic ripening came a moral inflexibility labeled as purity, an absolutism impatient with relativism, a "moral resoluteness transcending knowledge." This tenacity simplifies the world and psyche but at the expense of strengthening its opposite. But this process led in Aschenbach's later life and writing to a sort of ossification, a conventional formal glibness and predictability. Finally, his monastic stillness led to fussiness and weariness, and he yearned to escape, if only for a holiday.
After a couple of abortive attempts at finding just the right location, he set sail for Venice. Disembarking into a gondola, he had premonitions of death, viewing the gondola as a coffin. After a mildly disagreeable confrontation with the gondolier, he arrived at his hotel on the Lido, aware that his solitude made him more aware of sensations than would be a traveler with a companion. And then, while waiting for dinner, he was captivated by the appearance of a 14-year-old Polish boy with his family. Encountering the boy repeatedly during the next day, he seemed to become increasingly intrigued, not to say infatuated. Yet in less than twenty-four hours, convinced that the atmosphere of Venice was making him ill, Aschenbach decided to leave the city, going so far as to send his luggage on ahead and himself going to the train station, during the ride to which he began having second thoughts, wishing to remain in Venice after all. To his joy, his luggage had been mis-routed, so he returned to his hotel to await the retrieval of his goods. Once back, he acknowledged to himself that the reason for his reluctance to leave Venice had been the boy, Tadzio, whom he again glimpsed.
Days pass, filled with glorious weather, and Aschenbach no longer considered leaving; throughout the days he watched Tadzio, his observations and descriptions deeply sensual; he was infatuated. All of creation was intensified and transformed by his infatuation, his mood and language being expressed in flowery tropes and Classical allusions. He extended his holiday in order to remain in Venice with Tadzio, still never having spoken to the boy. Finally, upon receiving a smile from the youth, Aschenbach acknowledged to himself that he was in love.
Four weeks passed, during which Aschenbach was now stalking Tadzio. At the end of this time Aschenbach became aware that an epidemic was spreading throughout Venice, noting that German-speaking tourists were leaving the city. Mann's language becomes gradually more voluptuous, sickening, rotting in its metaphors, steamy, exotic and fetid, suiting the mood of the story as Aschenbach became more and more obsessed, more reckless in his behavior. All this time, Aschenbach realized what was happening but justified it to himself. And at the same time, he continued to try to find out more about the spreading illness in the city, even as he seemed not to contemplate leaving. Discovering that the problem was cholera, that increasing numbers of people were dying, and that Venice officials were hushing the matter up, he contemplated warning Tadzio's mother to take her children and flee. But he decided not to do so, and with that decision began his further and more rapid moral decline, his descent into a deeper irrationality complete with nightmares in which he abandons his Apollonian life into a Dionysian frenzy, the psychic working out of his dissolution. He even went so far as to alter his appearance to appear more youthful, dying his hair, using makeup. Becoming increasingly tired, increasingly disoriented, increasingly ill, he fantasizes a speech by Socrates to a young lover to justify his own obsession as he lolls exhausted in a Venice square, having lost sight of Tadzio. A few days later, Tadio and his family left, but before they did Aschenbach once more watched Tadzio on the beach and, watching, died.
This is a powerful and masterfully written novel, outstanding in its creation of a mood and process."
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