Death in Venice and Other Tales
by Thomas Mann

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Book Reviews of Death in Venice and Other Tales

Book Review: Mann's Afternoon of a Faun
Summary: 5 Stars

"Death in Venice," with no sexual passages, has supreme sexuality. Sensuousness. Delirious feasts at the molten center of everything. It is a sinecure that was struck into a prosaic world in the early part of the last century. It is sun umbrellas and long dining halls and eyes secretly turned toward the only reason for life, and mist and dank smelling Venice canals. It is doom messenger and prognosticator of the stars that seem to have been residing in a timeless golden boy all along, stirring inside himself, he not knowing how to handle it, other than to be a young frail god come from the sea, housed in perfection that is flawed only by poor teeth that Von Aschenbach notes means the boy shall not

live long, and there is shameful comfort for the man in that. "Death in Venice" is the pure sweet long note of love, the kind that Von Aschenbach has been using to call down through his life, even when he did not know the ultimate poetry in him was to reside in this last hope, cast as a sun bronzed boy beamed into the existence
of a man who remembers, in a newly familiar way, his own childhood, and stirs the flames of it, making it complete somehow, at long last.

Von Aschenbach, sitting in a beach chair, alone, so close to Tadzio, alone, and writing of beauty, of Greek myths, of a lad loved by jealous gods, of all the magicality that a mind in limbo, in tiredness of selling his early talent to be packaged in boxes, now sees this boy inside his own mind, sees the fine clean limbs, the perfect arrangement of them in standing and walking and being, the proud head of Tadzio turned just so, sees all those dreams which he tempered and denied and flattened and hid and thought the worth of a man was in what he could twist into something that was not. Von Aschenbach, so musing that the reading public should not know what goes into creation of a work, of this man lost in delirium, in the need to remake his life, to paint himself up with wax and curled hair and the unnecessary beads, like those of that mad clown who he has seen so terribly terrifyingly up close. And in cholera ridden Venice, he comes to death as he did once to life. With forlorn joy. To press his head against Tadzio's closed room door. To warn, if he could, the boy never to smile at him or anyone that smile that is of a lad looking into his own forest well of the ultimate sun. To strain the wings of eternity and to rush to it willingly, renouncing fog and dense conjecture left on a far horizon like a black cloud brackish and unwanted ever again

"Death in Venice" is precise, mystical, dizzying in its complexities. The stately comely song of man and it comes out giddy and filled with opera and huzzahs and such bleeding sadness that it has taken this long for Von Aschenbach to piece together the strands and mosaics that he knew all along, all this time, without knowing. It is presentment and miracle. It is Thomas Mann's grandiloquent usage of the words that heads devise and that hearts hold in trust. There is much in Tadzio and Von Aschenbach that compliment each other. Artistically. Beatifically. Angelically. Tadzio, out of his time, on the wrong planet, fought with by another boy, his servant, tossed to the ground, this godlet, by the boy who must hate him for a million known and unknown reasons. Then giving Tadzio mercy and letting him free, so Tadzio might do the same for Von Aschenbach. The boy of Von Aschenbach's conch shell corridors shows the man what Tadzio might not understand at all, that he is the pathway of a God in some other place unknown before by anyone, and still unknown, a more than human song pointing the way for Von Aschenbach out of life into a tomorrow of sleep and comfort, and home to a dying man, where one might need never fear and be unsure or have to explain himself to covert eyes that would never even try to understand, ever again.. Do they then touch, in another land less convoluted, with no sickness scourging? Yes! Gold calls to gold and the beloved, Mann writes, is less a being of wisdom and desire, than the one who beloves him. Reality trembles and a great slow sepia colored afternoon of late massively hot summer in a place strange and faraway thus dies.

Summary of Death in Venice and Other Tales

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