Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann

Mann's work was recommended to me enthusiastically, with a "just don't think too hard" caveat tacked on. I always considered my approach to literature rather dilettantish anyway.

This book is a collection of Mann's turn-of-the-century short stories that explore themes of the genius in art and intellect within a motif of the German at home and abroad. The stories share threads of recurring elements, illuminating the essential aspects of Mann's own creativity.

"Death in Venice," "Tonio Kroger," and "Disorder and Early Sorrow" were the only stories whose merits outweighed any untoward content. The other five, while undoubtedly well-written and with some merits of their own, alternated between sordid and dull, and so I am unable to give them praise that is not heavily qualified.

"Death in Venice": On a trip to Venice, an acclaimed author sights a young, attractive Polish Adonis of sorts, and, overwhelmed with the beauty of his countenance, forsakes reason to follow him for weeks on end. The boy's comely features send the man into philosophizing reveries on the nature of literary expression and the creator and his creation. "Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought- these are the artist's highest joy," he muses during his undaunted pursuit.

There is irony in Mann's name, for he examines extensively the emasculation of his linguistic artist. His protagonist asks, "[D]o you believe that such a man can ever attain wisdom and true manly worth, for whom the path to the spirit must lead through the senses?" This man's decidedly effeminate nature detracts from the intellectual insights he has, and he clearly tries to justify his unwholesome affection for the young boy under a guise of aesthetics. More's the pity.

"Tonio Kroger": Again the androgynous artist appears. Dark-complexioned Tonio Kroger lives the fitful, melancholy passion of the litterateur, silently envying the blue-eyed blonds who surround him in their blissful ignorance. He considers his artistic gifts a curse inherited from his mother's temperamental Italian blood, contending that he was not destined, but doomed, from birth, to create. However, a trip to Denmark gives him the presence of mind to accept and even revel in his love of the "blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, and commonplace."

"Disorder and Early Sorrow": A professor and his young daughter experience a presentiment of later sorrows that inevitably come when she dances with one of her older brother's friends on a lark at a party. The five-year-old feels an indefinite sense of the envy and longing that accompany rejection when she has to go to bed and her humoring partner reunites with his date. Her father observes it all with a helpless pathos.

This was the purest of Mann's stories, exquisite in its sorrow, tender in its telling, noble and unwavering in its feeling. He was at the top of his form here.

Mann is splendid when he conducts esoteric discussions of Life and Art, as it were, but he often becomes mired in the disturbing and the unsavory. It's unfortunate, for he is a consummate writer.