Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
(Click here)
Book Summary Information
Author: Thomas MannTranslator: Michael Henry Heim
Introduction: Michael Cunningham
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-05-31
ISBN: 0060576170
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780060576172
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Book Reviews of Death in Venice
Book Review: A New translation: DEATH IN VENICE more radiant than ever!
Summary: 5 Stars
For those legions of readers who consider Thomas Mann's DEATH IN VENICE one of the pinnacles of 20th Century literature, welcome to the feast! Michael Henry Heim has restudied and again translated this brief but poignant novella with an English version more in tune with Mann's novella and certainly, finally free from all the societal homophobic restrictions that have shrouded previous translations. This is the tale of a writer - Gustav von Aschenbach - in his fifties who feels the need for exotic travels to break his writer's block, and after many aborted attempts to find the right place, comes to Venice and not only falls under its spell but also finds his sublimated desires for pure beauty as focused on young men awakened in his encounter with the young Polish boy Tadzio. This story has been translated into other languages, transformed into film by Luchino Visconti and made into the last opera of Sir Benjamin Britten. But though the simple story has captivated our minds for many years, it has never been presented in so eloquent a fashion as in this Heim translation. To wit: "On a personal level, too, art is life intensified: it delights more deeply, consumes more rapidly; it engraves the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventure on the countenance of its servant and in the long run, for all the monastic calm of his external existence, leads to self-indulgence, over refinement, lethargy, and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender." When he first encounters Tadzio "...he was infused with a paternal affection, the attraction that one who begets beauty by means of self-sacrifice [a writer] feels for one who is inherently beautiful." And "Was it not common knowledge that the sun diverts our attention from the intellectual to the sensual? It benumbs and bewitches both reason and memory such that the soul in its elation quite forgets its true nature and clings with rapt delight to the fairest of sun-drenched objects, nay, only with the aid of the corporeal can it ascend to more lofty considerations."
Once von Aschenbach accepts the fact that he is in love with the idea of Tadzio he sets about to quash rumors of the threat that cholera is invading Venice to keep his Polish lad from leaving the city (and von Aschenbach) with his family. "Thus the addled traveler could no longer think or care about anything but pursuing unrelentingly the object that had so inflamed him, dreaming of him in his absence, and, as is the lover's wont, speaking tender words to his mere shadow. Loneliness, the foreign environment, and the joy of a belated and profound exhilaration prompted him, persuaded him to indulge without shame or remorse in the most distasteful behavior, as when returning from Venice [to the Lido] late one evening he had paused at the beautiful boy's door on the second floor of the hotel and pressed his forehead against the hinge in drunken rapture, unable to tear himself away even at the risk of being discovered and caught."
Has Heim 'changed' Mann's story in to a more titillating one? No, indeed not! But he has rescued it from the mere Apollonian/Dionysian rhetoric with which other translations have cloaked the sensual aspects of the story. Here von Aschenbach becomes a fully three-dimensional character, one whose life up to the entry into Venice is understood and appreciated as a writer of brilliance, and one whose epiphany of the Eros submerged in this intellectual psyche blossoms in the most credible, tender way that far from being transformed into a 'pedophile', he is instead in that wondrous plane where awakened emotions of love and longing dwell.
Michael Cunningham has written a beautiful introduction to this new translation and, as we have come to expect from this contemporary gifted man of letters, his words are warm and befitting his admiration for this work by Thomas Mann. This is a book to be read and read again, and should you have other versions of DEATH IN VENICE in your library, that is all the more reason to pleasure your mind with the genius of this translation. Highly recommended! Grady Harp, December 09
Summary of Death in Venice
The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim
Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.
In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."
Mann, Thomas Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Audiobooks on Cassette
- Audiobooks on CD
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- e-Books
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Mann, Thomas Books
God of Dirt: Mary Oliver and the Other Book of Godby Thomas W. Mann
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Published: 2004-06-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.58
Price in other shops:
Doctor Faustus (Everyman's Library)by Thomas Mann, H. T. Lowe-Porter
Everyman's Library; Published: 1992-06-02; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.08
Price in other shops:
Death in Veniceby Thomas Mann
Penguin Classics; Published: 1999-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.22
Price in other shops:
The Magic Mountain (Everyman's Library)by Thomas Mann
Everyman's Library; Published: 2005-06-21; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $15.85
Price in other shops:
Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friendby Thomas Mann
Vintage; Published: 1999-07-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.90
Price in other shops:
Joseph and His Brothers: The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, Joseph the Providerby Thomas Mann
Everyman's Library; Published: 2005-05; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $25.40
Price in other shops:
Death in Veniceby Thomas Mann
Harper Perennial; Published: 2005-05-31; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.04
Price in other shops:
Death in Venice: And Seven Other Storiesby Thomas Mann
Vintage; Published: 1989-03-13; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.22
Price in other shops:
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (Everyman's Library)by Thomas Mann
Everyman's Library; Published: 1994-10-04; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.85
Price in other shops:
The Magic Mountainby Thomas Mann
Vintage; Published: 1996-10-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $11.00
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
The Roots of Romanticismby Isaiah Berlin
Princeton University Press; Published: 2001-04-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $11.99
Price in other shops:
The Nazi Conscienceby Claudia Koonz
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Published: 2005-11-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.43
Price in other shops:
Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friendby Thomas Mann
Vintage; Published: 1999-07-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.95
Price in other shops:
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novelby Geoff Dyer
Pantheon; Published: 2009-04-07; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $12.25
Price in other shops:
The Magic Mountainby Thomas Mann
Vintage; Published: 1996-10-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.42
Price in other shops:
Death in Veniceby Thomas Mann
Penguin Classics; Published: 1999-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.22
Price in other shops:
Reading and Writing from Literatureby John E. Schwiebert
Wadsworth Publishing; Published: 2004-08-13; Paperback; Book
Best price: $62.00
Price in other shops:
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Modern Library Classics)by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Modern Library; Published: 2005-02-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.74
Price in other shops:
The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (New York Review Books Classics)by Glenway Wescott
NYRB Classics; Published: 2001-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.95
Price in other shops:
Death in VeniceWarner Brothers; Release date: 2004-02-17; DVD
Best price: $5.78
Price in other shops: