Death In Venice

by Thomas Mann

Overview

Death in Venice, novella by Thomas Mann, published in German as Der Tod in Venedig in 1912. A symbol-laden story of aestheticism and decadence, Mann's best-known novella exemplifies the author's regard for Sigmund Freud's writings on the unconscious. Gustav von Aschenbach is a revered author whose work is known for its discipline and formal perfection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789355845245
Publisher:	True Sign Publishing House
Publication date:	01/21/2023
Pages:	74
Sales rank:	431,650
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

German novelist, short story author, social commentator, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Paul Thomas Mann lived from 6 June 1875 to 12 August 1955. His sardonic and highly symbolic epic novels and novellas are renowned for their understanding of the minds of artists and intellectuals. He incorporated modernized versions of German and Biblical tales, as well as concepts from Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his analysis and critique of the European and German spirit. In his first book, Buddenbrooks, Mann-a member of the Hanseatic Mann family-depicted his clan and social status. Three of Heinrich Mann's six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann, and Golo Mann, all went on to become well-known German writers, as did his older brother Heinrich Mann, a radical writer. Mann escaped to Switzerland in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took office. He relocated to the United States in 1939 when World War II began, then went back to Switzerland in 1952. One of the most well-known authors of the so-called Exilliteratur, German writing produced in exile by individuals opposed to the Hitler government, is Mann.

Editorial Reviews

New versions of 12 celebrated stories, including the famous title novella, many previously collected in Mann's seminal Stories of Three Decades. Neugroschel's persuasive "Preface" makes a strong case for fresh translations, given both this century's inevitable linguistic shifts and Mann's employment within individual works of specific vocabularies and styles (e.g., those of Wagnerian opera in the hair-raising "The Blood of the Walsungs"). And Neugr"schel essentially finesses the issue of revealing the stories' inherent sexuality; their author was, after all, a master of elegant indirection dedicated to muted presentations of matters that were anathema to both his public and his own sedulously respectable persona. That said, it's wonderful to have vivid, lucid English versions of Mann's sophisticated portrayals of sexual obsession and humiliation ("Little Herr Friedemann"), illness- as-metaphor in a tale ("Tristan") that concisely prefigures The Magic Mountain, and the transfiguring intersection of artistic with homosexual passion (Death in Venice, Tonio Kr"ger). Brilliant work, in any case, from one of the century's great writers.

Kirkus Reviews