Reading 1001 discussion

Read 2016
This book by Thomas Mann is a novella that can give the reader a taste of the author's style. Thomas Mann writes with beauty and depth. The story is of an older artist, author who is suffering from writer's block. He decides to travel. At first he goes one place but "it isn't right" or he still can't write, so off to Venice he goes. On the way, he is annoyed by an older man trying to look young and hang out with youth. In Venice, he again feels suffocated and thinks to leave but circumstances occur and he stays where is obsession with a adolescent youth takes away any sense, logic and replaces it with passion and poor judgement. Nothing ever occurs, yet this love affair of the mind, leads to decay and death. A short but powerful story.

I read this novella for the second time in a very short time span and I am amazed at the difference that I experienced in reading. I was rather overwhelmed during my first time through with the nature of the writing and the plot structure. On my second pass, I was able to really appreciate the classical Greek overtones and many of the more subtle layers of the work.
A elderly German writer who has matured from being an "enfant terrible" to a highly respected classical author through an exceptional amount of effort and discipline, is suffering from a form of writer's block in which he can not make the words as smooth and disciplined as he would like. The author, Gustav Aschenbach, is simply not satisfied with less than perfection. He happens to see a strange man who may even have been deformed, and is the first of a number of "outsiders" who represent a dionysian temptation to appear in the work. This first sighting causes him to decide to take a vacation to an exotic land in order to escape the extreme amount of constraints his discipline puts on him. He eventually goes to Venice, where he has previously gotten ill, and there on the Lido beach sees the classical perfection that he has been seeking in the body of a young 14 year old boy. He can not sculpt such beauty from his block of language and he is overcome.
Aschenbach meets a number of further outsiders that serve to warn the reader of the direction our main character is headed. There is an old man attempting to appear young and giddy on the ship to Venice who disgusts our MC. There is a gondola owner who plays the part of Charon and who says: "you will pay". There is a traveling troop of entertainers who represent the vulgar popular side of Italian music rather than the classical operatic side.
Slowly Aschenbach's emotions evolve from a constrained and appreciative worship, to a passion, an obsession, a "crisis", and finally a crime, in that Aschenbach knows that the city is infected and in the midst of a cholera epidemic and does not tell the family of the boy he worships.
Ultimately Aschenbach does end up paying for his loss of discipline, his idleness and his effortless succumbing to beauty and grace.

Gail wrote: "I read this novella for the second time in a very short time span and I am amazed at the difference that I experienced in reading. I was rather overwhelmed during my first time through with the nat..."
Nice review

Pre-2016 review:

****

One of my ex-girlfriends many times recommended that I watched the movie based on this novella, stating that it was impossible to watch it without weeping at the end. While I am yet to see the Visconti masterpiece, I can now somewhat understand the emotional perspective emanating from this story. A German writer feeling the inspirational fire deserting him decides almost fortuitously to travel to Venice where he encounters the paragon of Beauty in a Polish teenage boy. His infatuation develops into an obsession until his untimely death, succumbing to a cholera epidemic. While the writing often enables you to feel what Aschenbach felt (for example, I was just as annoyed as he was at all the hurdles and inconveniences marring the beginning of his trip), the novella is made even richer by its multiple references to Greek philosophy and its allegorical use of the cholera epidemics plaguing the Mediterranean at the beginning of the 20th century. This text had all the elements of a classic novella (mounting tension, abrupt ending, albeit predictable) and more.

An aging writer with writer's block finds the Platonic ideal of beauty in the form of a 14 year boy, and becomes creepily obsessed with him. There's a lot of foreshadowing and a lot of Greek elements to analyse. This was my first Thomas Mann, and I'm almost scared to try any of his longer works. I got helplessly lost in his long sentences and imagery. I tried a combination of reading it in German (beyond my skill) and listening to the LibriVox recording of an English translation (somewhat monotonous). As a result, a lot of the beauty was lost on me, and I became too impatient to really consider the point of all the digressions into Greek myth. I was also a bit worried that we would end up in a vague sort of Lolita territory, because the old man thought a lot about Eros, and not so much about Agape or Philia. After reading Gail's excellent review I think this is a book I'll have to try again at a later date, with a (newer) translation on paper that I can linger over.