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BOOKS I READ: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912) translation by Kenneth Burke. Gustav Aschenbach, a fifty-something-year-old successful writer, travels to Venice for a much-needed vacation. At his hotel, he encounters a well-to-do Polish family with daughters like nuns, and a beautiful younger boy with golden curls. Aschenbach is taken by the boy’s perfection, an admiration that grows from afar. He follows discretely when the Tadzio and his sisters visit San Marco Square; he spies on him from a perch when he frolics with other boys in the sand by the shoreline. When Gustav discovers a growing public health emergency, a plague, he’s conflicted about letting the Polish family know about the dangers of staying in Venice, or whether to keep silent so they don’t hurry away from the hotel. He ignores his own well-being, as long as Tadzio is within his orbit.
Mann’s novella is Aschenbach’s psychological state. It encapsulates the old man’s infatuation for a fourteen-year old boy, an obsession that gets increasingly dangerous—and disconcerting for the reader—but never leaves Aschenbach’s mind.
Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. He fled Germany before the war, becoming an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime in exile.
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