Simon Callow is the narrator of this particular release. Clocking in at about 3 hours, the audio version helped me appreciate its quality. The short novel, Death In Venice, is a magnificent work of literature. Can’t say I “enjoyed” it, but I do think it is an important piece of literature that conjure up Poe’s Mask of the Red Death and Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Grey for me. It is a novel that begs to be dissected with a scalpel. The irony of a man who criticizes others for faults he so obviously shares the contrast between youth and old age, innocence and corruption the presence of death in the midst of life and the corrosive nature of self-importance. There are numerous themes running through this novel. Unlike the perversion in Lolita, this perversion is kept in the right perspective for me the child is innocent and there is no pretense that there is anything pure or acceptable about the thoughts of this old man. There is a predatory element to this novel that makes the reader cringe. Once Aschenbach makes the decision to go to Venice, the writing begins to flow. It provides information that is essential to understanding this man and his ramblings, but I had to push through the first two chapters. I would caution other readers that the start of this is extremely laborious and slow. What a visceral writer he is! Once he engaged me, he kept me to the end, which was one of the finest endings I could imagine. And have you observed that the seat in such a boat, that armchair painted black like a coffin and upholstered in a dull black, is the softest, most luxurious and enervating seat in the world?
The strange conveyance, handed down without any change from days of yore, and so peculiarly black-the only other thing that black is a coffin-recalls hushed criminal adventures in the night, accompanied only by the quiet splashing of water even more, it recalls death itself, the bier and the dismal funeral and the final taciturn passage. None of them irrelevant, however all contributing something to the meaning and understanding of the story and most foreshadowing the outcome. I stopped several times to ponder the classical allusions that were scattered throughout the story, some of them obvious references and some of them so subtle that they might easily escape your notice. First off, nobody would accuse Mann of not being intellectual enough.
This is my first experience of Thomas Mann and I am staggered by how much he can pack into a book that I would term more a novella than a novel.
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