About Death in Venice
“It was the urge to escape—he admitted to himself—this yearning for the new and the remote, this appetite for freedom, for unburdening, for forgetfulness; it was a pressure away from his work, from the steady drudgery of a coldly passionate service.”
Death in Venice is a novella written by the German author and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, first published in 1912. The work follows the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer, who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a beautiful youth, a Polish teenage boy named 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." A masterful, poignant literary masterpiece, exploring diverse themes including mortality, decay, aestheticism and decadence. This edition features an English translation by Kenneth Burke.
In addition to Death in Venice, this volume includes "Mario and the Magician," "Disorder and Early Sorrow," "A Man and His Dog," "Felix Krull," "The Blood of the Walsungs," "Tristan," and "Tonio Kroger."
These stories, as direct as Thomas Mann's novels are complex, are perfect illustrations of their author's belief that "a story must tell itself." Varying in theme, in style, in tone, each is in its. own way chracteristic of Mann's prodigious talents. From the high art of the famous title novella ("A story," Mann said, "of death... of the voluptuousness of doom"), to the irony of "Felix Krull," the early story on which he later b ased his comic novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, they are stunning testimony to the mastery and virtuosity of a literary giant.
