Rating: 
Summary: Magnificent
Review: A breathtaking masterpiece of description. You will find yourself wanting to read this one very slowly, in order to savor the magnificent prose and not miss anything. As in all collections, some entries are more interesting than others. My favorites were "Tonio Kroger" for its look inside the soul of artistic people, and "The Blood of the Walsungs" for its bold look at incest, a story in which the protagonists, a sister and brother--twins to boot--find each other irresistible, and spend a good deal of the time caressing and kissing each other; the subject matter of this tale will make many readers uneasy, but it is told beautifully, and Mann captures, in mere words, all the physical charms of the ardent brother and sister. The other stories were secondary in merit, including "Death in Venice," which was largely uninteresting, covering an authour who, approaching death, gets smitten by a Polish boy in that canal city. Still, for anyone interested in the craft of writing, this book is a must. Enjoy.
Rating: 
Summary: The return of the repressed/Dionysos
Review: Aschenbach, an ageing, ascetic author makes up his mind to visit Venice in the hope of encountering "distant scenes". There he becomes wildly infatuated with a fourteen-year-old Polish boy, the Hyacinth of myth, named Tazio. The narrative centres around the fumbling and pathetic attempts made by the protagonist to address the object of his love, eventually resulting in the death of the aged Aschenbach. Mann seems interested in establishing parallels between Aschenbach's condition and the ideals of classical antiquity, as the substantial [mis]-quotations from Plato's "Phaedrus" make clear. However, the story lends itself to other interpretations, such as the asethetics of Nietzsche, with its duality of "Apollinism" and "Dionysism", of which Mann was a fervent disciple. Aschenbach's dignified, ordered, rational, harmonious, Apolline existence can be read as being ruptured by the irrational force of the Dionysian, the instinct of intoxication and self-destructive excess. Similarly, Mann's portrayal of Aschenbach's infatuation with Tazio can be interpreted along Freudian lines. What of the scene in which Aschenbach is set to leave Venice but loses his bags, then returns and it is only *after* the fact that he discovers the real reason for his return? This is clearly a dramatisation of what Freud terms neurosis, the conflict between an unconscious desire and a prohibitive command of the conscious. The elevated, detached, "objective" style shows Mann to have been committed to the classical paradigms of narrative and composition and, in this respect, he invites comparison with Flaubert.
Rating:
Summary: Classic Literary Fiction (Literally)
Review: I was given "Death in Venice" by a close friend. Scary how well she knows me. It was the perfect gift. "Death in Venice" is a collection of eight of Thomas Mann's best short stories. Usually, I'm not really one for short stories, as most times I find myself hanging at the end and disappointed in the development of the plots and characters. I was not disappointed with this book. Through his eight stories, Mann explores many aspects of human nature...most notably love. Each story has a different theme, but there is an underlying passion for life and meaningful relationships that fills each tale with beauty and a bittersweet longing. Topics in this collection range from a look at the world from the view of a young artist, a man's respect for the family pet that worships him, a stark look at an incestuous relationship between twins, a family trip to Venice gone awry, and many others. My only difficulty is that the language used is a bit more obscure than most of us are used to. I hadn't realized how important commas were, and there usefulness was proven by the lack of them in Mann's work. Usage and structure was different at the time of these writings, however, and not much time is needed to adjust. I would recommend "Death in Venice" to anyone who enjoys classic literature, or who enjoys reading the work of someone who is passionate about what they do and how they live. It is definitely worth the time invested.
Rating:
Summary: Classic Literary Fiction (Literally)
Review: I was given "Death in Venice" by a close friend. Scary how well she knows me. It was the perfect gift. "Death in Venice" is a collection of eight of Thomas Mann's best short stories. Usually, I'm not really one for short stories, as most times I find myself hanging at the end and disappointed in the development of the plots and characters. I was not disappointed with this book. Through his eight stories, Mann explores many aspects of human nature...most notably love. Each story has a different theme, but there is an underlying passion for life and meaningful relationships that fills each tale with beauty and a bittersweet longing. Topics in this collection range from a look at the world from the view of a young artist, a man's respect for the family pet that worships him, a stark look at an incestuous relationship between twins, a family trip to Venice gone awry, and many others. My only difficulty is that the language used is a bit more obscure than most of us are used to. I hadn't realized how important commas were, and there usefulness was proven by the lack of them in Mann's work. Usage and structure was different at the time of these writings, however, and not much time is needed to adjust. I would recommend "Death in Venice" to anyone who enjoys classic literature, or who enjoys reading the work of someone who is passionate about what they do and how they live. It is definitely worth the time invested.
Rating:
Summary: Man as Artist in "Death in Venice"
Review: In "Death in Venice," Mann crafts an exquisite portrait of "man as artist." Through the character of Aschenbach, Mann explores the artist's role in the public realm as well as his need for fulfillment in his private life. Using the character of Tadzio as a symbol of true artistic beauty, Mann weaves a love story that is at once both destructive and redemptive. This novella is painfully beautiful and hauntingly memorable -- a staggering accomplishment.
Rating:
Summary: Blood of the Walsungs
Review: In "Death in Venice," Mann crafts an exquisite portrait of "man as artist." Through the character of Aschenbach, Mann explores the artist's role in the public realm as well as his need for fulfillment in his private life. Using the character of Tadzio as a symbol of true artistic beauty, Mann weaves a love story that is at once both destructive and redemptive. This novella is painfully beautiful and hauntingly memorable -- a staggering accomplishment.
Rating: 
Summary: A Wonderfully Complex Writer
Review: Mann is to be struggled with; his work to be attacked and repulsed - it is the embodiment of engaging, challenging fiction. It may be advisable to start out with Mario and the Magician, a splendid and accessible story of a hypnotist performing amazing acts on an incredulous audience that is itself hypnotic in alluring its character audience and the reader into a seeminly pedestrian story that turns out to have a whimsical, fantastic denouement. M&M also doubles as a grand metaphor for the fascism that was beginning to grip Germany - the awesome power of a tyrant and the dangerous nakedness of a raptured audience. Mann passes the test of great writing, in that even in translation, one can appreciate the literary dexterity of a master at work - a writer carried away, inhabiting each sentence of his story. Some of his lesser stories, towards the end of the anthology, are sprawling introspectives and thoroughgoing accounts of places and things. Death in Venice is a seminal work and sets the tone for Mann's subtle revelations of repressed passions and the tabboo. Mann elegantly lays bare human souls, yet keeping the lid safely fastened to the pressured jar. One of my favorites was Toni Kroger - a touching story of an artist's life, from young man to mature adult. Mann renders beautifully unrequited love and homosocial admiration by the introverted for the extroverts. In reading his stories, we may find that he expresses memories and feelings that were always there, but could not find the words for before. That, perhaps, is the highest achievement of a writer.
Rating:
Summary: All great, but don't miss MARIO AND THE MAGICIAN!!!
Review: The reviews here are all right on. This collection may be the best intro to the GREATEST 20th Century Author..(OK, you may not agree.) Much of Mann is difficult and dense,even for me, a longtime devotee. In this collection, start off with MARIO, a superior look at the sacred and profane. We find a German tourist and his young family in Italy going into a seemingly harmless carnival-type show. The author's portrait of the innocent young is itself worth the entire book,their enchantment at the acts,until an ugly mesmorist makes his appearance performing seemingly impossible tricks on members of the crowd. Slowly, the innocent crowd has been hooked, the children awed by the whole thing, until the final,inevitable end. Reading this,I thought,"Are there really people out there who can perform such acts?" Who knows, but this story is surely a classic,along with the six others, mainly described in other reviews.
Rating:
Summary: A great introduction to reading Thomas Mann
Review: Thomas Mann may be an acquired taste in literature; he himself admitted that he had great difficulty knowing when to stop. Buddenbrooks, his autobiographically-based novel of a Northern German merchant family before WWI was supposed to be a short book of about 250 pages, like a Scandinavian novel. Well, it is far longer, and if you like Mann, you are glad of it. However, tackling The Magic Mountain, with its long philosophical discourses, or other Mann novels is a lot easier if you begin with these short works. (Short is relative; Death in Venice was supposed to be a short story and ended up, predictably, a novella.) The themes in these works show up again in Mann's other writings; Tristan in particular, is a sketch for The Magic Mountain (thumbnail sketch, to be sure.) Tonio Kroger resembles Buddenbrooks in the autobiographical details and setting. The theme of sexual perversion and decadence heading to destruction (supposedly a metaphor for the society of pre-war Germany) appear in both Death in Venice and Blood of the Walsungs. If you are new to Thomas Mann, these works are a wonderful place to start. If you grow to love his writing, re-reading these is always a pleasure.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, Classic Literature
Review: Thomas Mann wrote "Death in Venice" in 1911. The protagonist, formerly a self-controlled and respectable public figure, gives himself over to obsessively stalking a 14-year-old boy for whom he has erotic feelings. While these feelings would be unacceptable to most people in our era, it is still difficult for us to appreciate the degree of condemnation they would have attracted when this story was written. Yet, Sigmund Freud had published The Interpretation of Dreams a decade earlier, and German intellectuals like Thomas Mann were aware that censurable urges lurk beneath conscious notice within all of us. Through this story, the author was surely struggling to come to terms with his own homoerotic urges. Judging from what he wrote, these were deeply troubling to him: corruption, decay, and condemnation are the themes he presents to us. While the images conveyed through this story are repugnant and shocking, the writing is beautiful and affecting. Several of the other stories in this volume are of similar quality, and similarly deal with troubling themes ("Mario and the Magician," "The Blood of the Walsungs"). Yet, Mann was also capable of an extended and sincerely felt appreciation of the more benign and wholesome aspects of our world ("A Man and His Dog"). These stories are worth reading and re-reading. Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, and these stories, if not Nobel prize quality, at the very least show Mann to be an engaging and entertaining writer.
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