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 Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

My issue with this book isn't so much the ideas it presents but the way in which it presents them. It's very short and pretty readable even for the economically uneducated, but it exists in this form because it's a classist call-to-action to those not educated enough to see past its persuasiveness. And I despise that about it.

This book wasn't created to teach, it was created to galvanize. It's what people think the Bible and the Qu'ran and every other religious text are: The Manifesto is, more than anything, a call to commit aggressive violence. I can't say whether Marx wrote it to be self-serving or whether he truly believed it would benefit the human condition. Cynically, I prefer to believe the former. Either way, The Communist Manifesto, like Mein Kampf before it, is a book that's worth reading so you're better equipped to disarm its tactics and counter its ideas.

My final, petty revenge on The Communist Manifesto is purchasing this stupidly pretty Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, clocking in at a scant 112 pages, for a whole $15, when I could have just downloaded it for free anywhere since it's in the public domain. I was free to determine that the value of this pretty paper copy of the book was worth the money, so I gave a bunch of bourgeois pigs some of my money I earned in exchange for selling my labor and The Communist Manifesto arrived on my doorstep two days later.

Ain't Capitalism grand?

⭐

The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka

During my "I need to try and pretend I'm smart enough to read and enjoy this" pre-read research, I stumbled upon lengthy gushings by Vladimir Nabokov on Franz Kafka. Nabokov couldn't shut up about the quality of Kafka's prose, the genius of his storytelling, or the influential nature of his work. In reading The Metamorphosis, I could recognize all of these things. Kafka undeniably influenced the kitsch-loving postmodernist horde of hipsters reading his work now (not that there's anything wrong with those people, of course), and the absurd humor of The Metamorphosis in particular (I have yet to read anything else by him) is undeniable. I found myself amused immediately within reading the opening few paragraphs.

But as I continued into the second chapter, I began to realize I wasn't enjoying myself. So my question grew from "am I enjoying this?" into "why aren't I enjoying this?"

Kafka had a sad, depressing life. He lacked adequate feelings of self-worth, had few fruitful social relationships, was physically and mentally abused by his brute of a father, and was sexually frustrated. All of this shows in his work, and Metamorphosis perfectly captures these feelings via the medium of his storytelling. Therein lies the brilliance of Kafka. Though suppositions of allegory and symbolism persist even to today, I prefer Nabokov's view that this was a work which Kafka originally meant to be taken literally (or as literally as you can take it given what Kafka has written, at least). The story absent any intentions of subjectivity adequately imparts Kafka's feelings of hopelessness, shame, dissatisfaction with life. Of not belonging, and not being understood. Of being hated, even, or hating oneself.

And these themes are fine. Plenty of literature explores these types of things. But so much of Metamorphosis—perhaps due to Kafka's outlook on life—is relentlessly cynical, cruel, and depressing, that I couldn't enjoy it. Though very different in style, it felt like reading Cormac McCarthy—another extremely popular literary writer that I don't care for, despite my easy recognition of the wordporn qualities of his prose. To me, the core message of both is "life sucks, people are mean, and then you die". They both try and temper the hopeless bleakness of their work, of course; McCarthy tends to slip a sliver of hope into his stories, and Kafka tends towards snippets of absurd, black humor, but I could never find that the bits of levity created by either did enough to balance the level of cynicism in either.

In addition to this, much of the mode of Kafka's storytelling is simply not to my taste. I've never been a fan of absurdity and many of the tenets of the postmodernism that Kafka inspired fall flat on me. Perhaps I'm too old-fashioned; indeed I tend to prefer 19th century literature to its 20th century counterparts. Or perhaps I lack the imagination to deal with the subjectivity provided by postmodern literature. Whatever the case, I am at least able to grasp the quality of Kafka's storytelling. But it's something that simply falls well outside my taste.

So I've got to go with the laziest, safest, and lamest of all critiques: I didn't really enjoy this, but I can see the value of it. I can easily see why other people like it, and I don't fault them for it.

As I read this and thought about how I'd write my review (because I guess that's what I do now; think about my blog reviews as I'm reading like the massive internet nerd that I am), I tried to work through various different ways to apologize to the legendary late Mr. Nabokov for disliking Metamorphosis. I couldn't really come up with anything better than to admit to being a tawdry mouthbreather. And unlike Kafka, who seemed to hate himself, I'm okay with being who I am. Bad opinions and all.

⭐⭐