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.
Rating:
Summary: Life, Death, and Art
Review: When I think of Mann, and of this book in particular, I am caught up in epithets and contradictions: insightful, artistic, polished, brooding, ponderous, pretentious, time-bound, and slow. I cannot think of this book without thinking that it is an expression of a past era, yet an expression with some universal themes about human psyche and behavior. Mann is the highest literary embodiment of Nietzschean depth psychology and his philosophy of the Appollonian-Dionysian duality. He puts this Nietzsche-ism in the dialogues and monologues of his characters. I dare say that all of his *main* characters have been infected by something irrational and Dionysian, which they cannot shake off. Their souls have been skewed. They need to play out their drama, but not before a dose of philosophizing seeps into the story through conversations and reflections. Consequently, in this collection of short stories, the stories are not short at all, and some of them go for over 40 pages. What Mann portrays are characters affected by Nietzschean philosophy and Freudian psychology but in a subdued and cultured way. They are usually not frenzied or overtly irrational. Their layer of normality is rather thick, but beneath that layer, deterioration of the human soul continues. Whether it is an aged artist who is a repressed homosexual pedophile, a brooding young man of mixed ethnic heritage in the nationalist Germany, or the incestuous twins--all of them are living expressions of the breakdown of orthodoxy and dysfunctional life in the labyrinth of human history.
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