Better every time I read it. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2015 about this read: "A novella, considered one of his best works, including by Thomas Mann. Older man falls in in-fatuation with classically beautiful teen boy while vacationing in Venice. Death comes to Venice and to him." Quotations in the comments section are my exact kindle highlights. ( )

I've never quite been on board with high modernism. No one is ever allowed to just feel something, every aspect of our emotional lives has to be treated with a great deal of gravity and earnestness. I can relate to the sudden desire to travel, to escape, to experience the exotic, but it's just as often a passing fancy as some profound shift that needs to be explored in depth. And while the urge may be prompted by the sign of a funny-looking red headed dude, I tend to think it's been percolating through my subconscious for a while and this is the moment that it reaches the conscious. It doesn't match my own experience that the sight of someone beautiful could suddenly reveal something that was dormant for so long.

Nevertheless, there is still plenty to enjoy in this short book. Mann's brutal description of Gustav Aschenbach is compelling and is so obviously a disgusted assessment of the author's own worst characteristics that it's heart-wrenching and appalling at the same time. The prose shines in the sections where the action is unfolding or Aschenbach is undergoing some character development, but there are some sections where nothing seems to happen, even on the most abstract level and the prose is somewhat murky and dull.

Summary: If you love reading about exaltation, you're going to love Death in Venice. ( )

Gustav von Aschenbach, en disciplinerad diktare med höga ideal, far på semester till Venedig. Där blir han oemotståndligt tjusad av en vacker fjortonårig pojke. Hans personliga förfall och lystenhet tilltar i takt med en epidemi som grasserar i staden.

Death in Venice is a novella written by German author, Thomas Mann. It was first published in 1912. It is a story about a writer who is suffering from writer’s block. He visits Venice and finds himself liberated, uplifted and then obsessed by the sight of a beautiful boy. Though he never actually speaks to the boy, or has any contact whatsoever, the writer feels a great passion. This obsession that he feels distracts him from the fact that rumors have begun to circulate about a disease that is spreading through the city.

Although a slim volume, Death in Venice is far from light reading. Strangely decadent and uncomfortable yet beautifully written the author uses the contrast between the young boy and the elderly author to symbolize the variation between youth and old age, as well as external and internal beauty and, of course, life and death. This symbolic story definitely held my attention but I felt myself more drawn to his writing style than to the story itself. ( )