Death in Venice (1912) by Thomas Mann

And his soul savored the debauchery and delirium of doom.

I read Death in Venice as a sort of companion piece to Nabokov's Lolita, which I found of remarkably brilliant craft and gorgeously written.

Mann's work is markedly more serious and introspective than Nabokov's mischievous, malevolently playful, and often darkly humorous work. Venice wholly lacks humor, instead filling its pages with a very introspective character study of the now-famous Aschenbach. Aschenbach is a relatively dry individual, mostly concerned with his work, admitting regularly that he devotes his every waking hour to his writing and giving little thought to other aspects of life. What we witness through the first three-quarters of Death in Venice is a deconstruction of what was once the rigid regimen of the man's life. I found the episode in which he makes the irrational decision to stay in Venice to be rather genuine instead of random, as it could have felt.

What initially engaged me were some of the heady topics Mann regularly examined via the thoughts of his character:

• For a major product of the intellect to make an immediate broad and deep impact it must rest upon a secret affinity, indeed, a congruence between the personal destiny of its author and the collective destiny of his generation. The people do not know why they bestow fame upon a given work of art. Though far from connoisseurs, they believe they have discovered a hundred virtues to justify such enthusiasm, yet the true basis for their acclaim is an imponderable, mere affinity.  

• On a personal level, too, art is life intensified: it delights more deeply, consumes more rapidly; it engraves the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventure on the countenance of its servant and in the long run, for all the monastic calm of his external existence, leads to self-indulgence, overrefinement, lethargy, and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender. 

• The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.   

• Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege. 

• He loved the sea and for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist’s need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Thomas Mann

In these, the book reads more similarly to some of the tangents a Dostoyevsky would be prone to, but they seem to sprout in a much less abrupt manner, arising organically through Aschenbach's thoughts or something that had occurred within the narrative.

Rather than Lolita—whose vastly controversial pedophilic relationship takes center-stage—the way Mann depicts Aschenbach's infatuation with Tadzio seems an altogether higher form of admiration. It's definitely not lustful, nor is it even really romantic love. Instead Aschenbach seems to hold the youth on a pedestal of aesthetic perfection, something that the character had already been established as clearly valuing, given his goal of depicting it in his own work. It makes sense to the reader that Aschenbach would fall into such a swoon over something like this. Tadzio just happened to be the perfect storm for the man; the right boy in the right place at the right time. Aschenbach's actions are perhaps 'creepy' from one witnessing him within the story, but since we are granted prime real estate in the man's head, it seems more to be genuine appreciation of something we can only somewhat grasp rather than the stalkerish infatuation that it appears on the surface. Humbert's obsession with Dolores Haze is disgusting, aggressive, and primarily self-serving, as it's meant to be viewed by Nabokov. He never aspires to what Mann seems to wish to depict: a more honest appreciation generated by the intense beliefs held by his character. As we witness Aschenbach's thoughts we realize there's no malevolence in his obsession. Thinking back on it after having completed the book intrigues me all the more.

I had no awareness of the plot of this book and so the climax surprised me. The novel descends into a spiral I won't spoil for others interested, but it's written in such a way that we feel the character's feverish, core alteration. The closing pages left me feeling as if I'd sunk into a fever dream; not completely conscious, nor was I asleep. It's a wonderfully off-putting bit of writing and a nice change of pace to what is can be a rather deliberate character study in the first half of the book.

Death in Venice makes a wonderful companion piece to Lolita. Nabokov is cleverer, but I think Mann aspires to something more. This is a must-read.

Translation note: I read Michael Henry Heim's translation, for which I'd heard plenty of praise, and found it to be enthralling. I never got the feeling I was reading a translation, but I don't speak German, nor did I read any other translation, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt. That said, I would recommend Heim.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Aeneid (19 BC) by Virgil

Aeneas Flees Burning Troy by Federico Barocci (1598)

The more I read ancient, epic poetry, the more I suspect that it's really just not for me.

As a Roman civ fanboy, I should have had a far greater interest in this than I did Homer's original poems. I found The Iliad to be beautifully written, but overly long and more than a bit repetitive. The Odyssey I liked quite a bit more. The Aeneid feels like more of the same, but of lesser quality.

It is, after all, propagandist fan-fiction of the highest caliber. Perhaps it's not the point, but I found little to hook me in the narrative and continued reading this with more of a rote feeling than an active engagement with it. Virgil was blatant in his intent to write this for a contemporary, Roman audience, so a lot of that blood-red chest-thumping is going to be lost on those of us reading it in the modern day. Was I supposed to feel some desire for the Trojans to found their new home? If so, I never did. So their serpentine journey through the Mediterranean felt more like just going through the motions to me rather than the winding adventure it was perhaps meant to be. Was I supposed to root for Aeneas? I never felt much sympathy for him, so his trials were rendered less entertaining than maybe they should have been.

I did find it interesting that the actual Trojan horse and sack of troy come from The Aeneid's second chapter rather than Homer's original poems. I noted their absence during my prior reads of The Iliad and The Odyssey. And there are portions of the story which are quite compelling; Aeneas coming across Dido in the underworld and the entire episode of Aeneas exploring the underworld with the Sibyl surely had to be an inspiration for Dante's later work Inferno. The Ahl translation that I read was superb, and my edition featured many illuminating endnotes which regularly described Virgil's brilliance in the construction of his Latin to feature multiple meanings, nearly by the page. Such is lost in the English translation, sadly, but it did allow me to appreciate why this was considered such a great work for so long by Latin readers over the past couple of millennia.

But there's just a bit too much of retreading Homer's steps going on. The most interesting portion of the story, to me, was trying to gain a grasp of whether or not Virgil was attempting to glorify the contemporary Augustan regime, and to what extent. It made for an interesting layer. But on its own, the story let me down. Maybe I should have waited a few more years between reading Homer and tackling The Aeneid.

I once read someone call a book "more enjoyable to appreciate than to read", and I'm feeling that with The Aeneid like I did with The Iliad. They were constructed as poetry, and I can't shake the suspicion that there's something lost in translation, because they just don't read the same prosaically. They're very repetitive, very indulgent, but not so much fun to read.

⭐⭐

Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov

Not going to be carrying this one around in public.

I read a used, dog-eared copy of Lolita that I purchased at a local library sale for next to nothing. The very first thing I read colored my expectations quite strongly. It wasn't the first page, nor the title page, nor even the dedication. It was right smack on the cover, a quote from Vanity Fair celebrating the work:

"The only convincing love story of our century."

Knowing the premise of the book, I thought; "wow, I wonder how Nabokov is going to pull off telling a genuine love story between a pedophile and a preteen girl".

The answer is: He doesn't. Not at all. Because that's not what the book is about.

Either the Vanity Fair commenter is a complete nincompoop and somehow managed to read a saccharine love affair into this grotesquely creepy, savagely predatory account, or the commenter shares my opinion and the publisher put this quote on the cover with the intention of warping their readers' expectations. Because if this is a love story, it's a love story only in how much Humbert loves himself.

There are two things most readers already know about this book even before picking it up: 1) It's a controversial story about a pedophile and his affair with a 12-year old girl. And, 2) It's extraordinarily well-written. Both of these are true. I expected the twist to be that I would be made to sympathize with the narrator, Humbert Humbert, on some level or other. But I never found myself coming close to the point of sympathy. From the get-go, Humbert is a rather blatant psychopath. He reacts with complete nonchalance to a death early in the story, he casually plots to murder others throughout, and for the vast majority of the novel he cares little for Lolita herself beyond what she means to him. Humbert isn't a gray hero or even a pitiable villain. He exists in this story as little more than a vampire; some monster of the night who manages to get his fangs into poor Lolita and spends the rest of the story slowly sapping her; consuming her essence, wearing her out, and grinding her down to a nub. He cares to preserve her only for his own enjoyment, admitting frequently that once she grows, he'll no longer be enamored with her. Were he to lose her, he would care only insofar as the absence of her affects his own life. He's an utterly selfish, predatory scoundrel, and we're given no reason whatsoever to sympathize with him. Nabokov himself agreed with this view of his narrator, calling Humbert "a vain and cruel wretch" and "a hateful person" in the Paris Review in 1967.

Although it's undoubtedly ballsy to tell a story of a pedophile in the comparably conservative 1950s, the true accomplishment of Lolita isn't just its controversial premise. Lolita herself gets little of the spotlight. She has hardly any dialogue, and what we do hear of her often does little more than describe Humbert's borderline insane obsession with her as an angelic superbeing:

Lolita had been safely solipsized. The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars; we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still forming the words of the Carmen-barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness.

In other, rarer episodes, the narrative depicts her as a rather typical young teenage girl; fawning over boys, playing tennis, sunbathing. For a love story to ring true, both characters must be genuine. No, Nabokov's real accomplishment in Lolita is the character of Humbert's unique voice and the quality of prose he uses to depict it. The character is so viscerally revolting that I found myself making cringing faces—almost subconsciously—while reading his words. And this isn't limited to Humbert's more overt displays of pedophilia. His worldview, his flamboyant way of speaking (particularly about himself), his dislike for the other people in the story, his single-minded obsession with possessing Lolita and the sociopathy he displays in its pursuit all qualify. He is a repulsive, disgusting character with no redeeming qualities. Reading Lolita is like reading a monster story from the point-of-view of the monster.

Vladimir Nabokov

And therein lies the twist. Lolita is colored with such odiousness by its narrator while simultaneously being one of the most gorgeous things I've ever read. Nabokov himself called Lolita "my love affair with the English language", and it shows. I don't believe I've ever read such consistently beautiful, fluid prose. Nabokov is at the peak of his powers as a writer, despite being confined with his second language—English—rather than his native Russian. Lolita is overly descriptive and undeniably flamboyant—indicative by itself of its narrator's high view on himself—but not so much so that it becomes over-the-top and a chore to read, like other writers who aspire to such high levels but succeed only in making their fiction an overly fatty, impenetrable mess. It rides along a narrow road and accomplishes both aesthetic beauty and consistency with its narrators voice. Additionally, Humbert's anti-social nature and cynical observations are often quite clever and darkly humorous. It seems that Nabokov succeeds in everything he intends to depict, despite comedy (especially dark comedy) being exceedingly hard to produce on the written page.

Such quality often carries the book as it stumbles onward through some dry spells in which nothing much is happening. Were it anybody else writing this story, I'd probably have set it down during one of two road trips in which we spend dozens of pages reading not much more than Humbert's obsessive fawning over his victim. Humbert is detestable, but Nabokov's talent as a writer keeps him from weighing too heavily on us as we read. Some of the stress incurred from reading such a putrid human being is dissipated by Nabokov's deft use of gallows humor through the work. Aside from Nabokov's colorful descriptions of Americana, there's not much to these passages in which Humbert and Lolita simply dip between motels. But these sections often feature depictions of the American west that are so gorgeous they're often worth the price of admission just by themselves, absent of any context:

And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called “sage brush” appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

Man, just look at that. I'd read Nabokov describing almost anything—it's stunning.

I knew quite a bit about this book before I ever read a page. And I had pretty high expectations from it. It managed to meet those while also surprising me a bit. It's extraordinarily written, it says important things and made me think deeply about its themes, and it imparted on me life experience I'd never have gained otherwise. It challenged me with a deep, genuine character whose beliefs and experiences attacked my own with each page.

All of these things are why I read fiction, and so Lolita succeeds.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Slow Learner (1961-1964) by Thomas Pynchon

The short story collection Slow Learner is my first exposure to Pynchon. I wonder if I've made a mistake and should have begun with one of the novels, such as V, or The Crying of Lot 49 instead.

Beginning with The Small Rain, I was struck immediately by some of the odd dialogue present (Pynchon seems to have confused Canadian accents with Southern), and the sex scene towards the end was curiously written. But I liked the character of Levine and the backdrop of a town destroyed by a hurricane and how the setting challenged Levine's worldview and lifestyle.

A bit rough in patches but it served as a decent enough introduction, I suppose.

The second story I found far more palatable. It's casually poetic, witty, fluid, dryly humorous, and more than a bit weird, Low-lands has me beginning to see what people adore so much in Pynchon. What I most enjoy about postmodern writers is the skill with which they render daily ennui interesting, and Pynchon does that well in the initial half of the story.

Pynchon is the second author (the other being Haruki Murakami) I've read lately who, in his own words, admits to disliking his early writings and tears them down in a foreword as amateurish work. Far be it for me to disagree with these legendary, masterful writers, but I've quite enjoyed the early material of both of them and found it worthwhile as a lead-in to later, more polished, and higher quality work.

Interestingly, Pynchon's story reminds me of a more humorous predecessor and obvious influence of Murakami's work in the surrealistic turn Low-Lands takes in its latter half, where we find our hero literally crawling down the rabbit gypsy hole and exploring an underground network of tunnels dug into a garbage dump in which a whole society of gypsies live in order to marry a three-foot-five-inch gypsy woman named Nerissa and help raise her pet rat called Hyacinth.

I swear I'm not making this up.

Up third, the story Entropy contains a few beautiful and genuinely humorous scenes that are well written, but both are constantly tempered by Pynchon's reversion back to having his characters talk at me as if he had a bullet list next to his typewriter filled with themes and ideas he had to force into this story by any means necessary. This doesn't work for me, and if Pynchon continues like this, I don't think we'll be able to be friends.

I could chalk this one up to being very-much-not-my-thing--I usually like my short stories subtle, laconic, and peppered with a bit of ambiguity; all of which Pynchon—in his overwritten style jam-packed with random factoids and obscure references—represents the polar opposite of.

I've heard that Entropy serves as a great introduction to Pynchon's unique style, which was made famous in his later work such as Gravity's Rainbow, which I'm building up to reading by first sampling some of his short stories. This is a bit worrisome since I didn't much care for this one. But I have a feeling his style will work better with a bit more polish and the more ample legroom offered by the novel versus the short story. We'll see.

Under the Rose, unfortunately, did nothing to dissuade the opinion formed by the prior story. Surely reading Raymond Carver's short fiction and John le Carré's spy fiction immediately before this didn't do any favors for Pynchon's brand of short spy fiction, which falls short of the high mark set by each. I found Under the Rose to be little more than an exercise in dry tedium. It's another story that probably works better in a longer format. I didn't feel I was given enough time to get to know these characters, indeed the only thing noteworthy about the characters are their silly names. The setting could have been an interesting one, but we're kept from spending much time there by a plot that trips forward monotonously, allowing for little life or character to the people in the story as it reaches a conclusion surely meant to have more impact than it does. Pynchon seemed more comfortable commenting on boring minutiae than filling out his characters. I found the entire thing a silly bore and loathed it.

I found the final story, titled The Secret Integration, to be a far more compelling one—at least initially. We're given a number of characters who instantly jump off the page at you, colored with Pynchon's trademark wackiness. The premise of a group of mischievous, memorable youths is whimsical and charming, but the serious edge Pynchon sets to it (the racial integration of a Massachusetts school during the American Civil Rights movement of the '60s) all but dissipates as Pynchon wastes his story mostly rambling on tangents about the various minutiae present in the story such as political figures of the Berkshires' past. I suspect this is just sort of Pynchon's thing: he seems to like vomiting his deep knowledge of useless, irrelevant facts onto the page right in the middle of a narrative that was really beginning to get interesting 8 pages ago when this meaningless diversion just got started. I didn't find any of these expository tangents engrossing enough to warrant their inclusion.

It's not all bad, though. This is the most well written story of the collection by far, featuring moments of virtuoso talent from Pynchon's pen. But the lack of a strict editor sees Pynchon waste this potentially entertaining story, and it fizzles out before it can make much of an impact, then ends.

Now that I've finished Slow Learner, my initial thoughts seem true: I do think I made a mistake reading this first of all Pynchon's work. It seems uneven and rambling, but I can see a glimmer of what folks must like about his work. So I'll pick another Pynchon up soon and hope that the good stuff shines through more often and more strongly, but for now I can't shake the fact that Pynchon's style just isn't for me.

⭐⭐