![]() This is fascinating in that in Mann’s later life he had to confront the rise of Nazism in his homeland. We learn from your book that Mann was fascinated by the role of the artist as artist versus that of artist as citizen. The serious writer is to be distinguished from the journalist who discusses books in the newspapers (in the “ Feuilleton” section of German newspapers). In my view, Edmund Wilson deserves that honor. How would that play out, for example, in the case of Edmund Wilson?įor Mann, the term ‘ Dichter’ - literally “poet,” but better translated as “man of letters” - inherits an especially honorable status from German tradition, and he wants to claim that honor for people who write in prose. You write that Mann made a distinction between a man of letters and a writer. Mann’s novella takes place under a southern sun that may trick us into thinking that all is as it seems James takes us through the fog of complex interpersonal relations. By contrast, in The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl, James deploys the groping language of everyday interactions to suggest the possibilities latent in the situations his characters encounter. The prose of Death in Venice is crystalline, apparently lucid - until you realize the multiple possibilities of irony and the juxtaposition of different narrative voices. Although there are points of more or less rapid change, I don’t think there’s any sharp division into “early” and “late” periods.īut Mann and James achieve their effects quite differently. In both instances, the style evolves and enables the author to deal in rich ambiguities. In your book you write, “To record the experiences of his author-protagonist Aschenbach, Mann crafted a new prose style, increasing the length and syntactic complexity of his sentences, the richness of his vocabulary.” Was this somewhat like the difference between the early and later works of Henry James? By contrast, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka were on the verge of publishing their first notable works: Swann’s Way would appear in 1913, Dubliners in 1914, Metamorphosis in 1915, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. Musil had published a controversial early novel ( The Confusions of Young Törless), but his vast, unfinished masterpiece ( The Man without Qualities) would only appear many years later. By 1912, Mann had already had one major success ( Buddenbrooks) and had followed it up with an influential novella ( Tonio Kröger). His great contemporaries were Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Robert Musil. How old was he and who were comparable writers of the time? ![]() You start out your book with a bit of scene setting about Thomas Mann’s life in 1911–1912, the period he worked on and published Death in Venice. There are other masterpieces, too, for example, Joseph and his Brothers (a tetralogy which is really neglected these days). The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus would have to be on anyone’s list of the 50 great novels in world literature. Buddenbrooks is the great 19th century German novel (even though it was published in 1901 - German literature was late in moving into the nineteenth century). I’m not sure how many American readers read Mann these days - when I was young, he was clearly viewed as one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, and much more accessible than Proust or Joyce. It’s brilliantly written and fascinatingly many-sided. It’s been translated into English many times, and some of the recent translations (those of David Luke, Clayton Koelb, and Michael Heim) are excellent. It also served as the main inspiration for the 1990 novel Love and Death on Long Island, a more humorous take on the novel that also gives it a Setting Update to 1990s America, which in turn received a 1997 film adaptation made by director Richard Kwietniowski, starring John Hurt and Jason Priestley.Death in Venice is one of the great pieces of short fiction in any language. Benjamin Britten has adapted this into an opera, and director Luchino Visconti made a 1971 film adaptation of the novella ( Morte a Venezia) starring Dirk Bogarde and Björn Andrésen. The novella is highly autobiographical: while holidaying in Venice, thirty-seven-year-old Mann, a married father, had crushed from afar on a ten-year-old Polish aristocrat, Wladyslaw Moes. ![]() Gustav finds himself drawn deeply into a ruinous inward passion, which has bad consequences for him as there is a cholera epidemic currently going down in the city. The story is about an aged writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, who travels to Venice on advice of his doctor and falls in love with a stunningly good-looking, aristocratic boy of fourteen, Tadzio, to whom he never speaks. Death in Venice is a 1912 novella written by the German author, Thomas Mann (original title Der Tod in Venedig).
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