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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐