a book
Death In Venice, And Seven Other Stories
Thomas Mann · 1954 · 416 pages
Eight complex stories illustrative of the author's belief that "a story must tell itself," highlighted by the high art style of the famous title novella.
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Nigella Lawson
“I know that the novella ‘Tonio Kroger’ is not Thomas Mann’s greatest work. There is some part of me that feels that I should be putting up ‘Buddenbrooks’ or ‘The Magic Mountain’ here. And there’s a strong case for ‘Death in Venice,’ too. But this is the book of his that felled me completely when I read it as a German student in my teens. All Mann’s enduring themes are here: the struggle between duty and love, between the febrile pleasure and teutonic responsibility; and the lethal vulnerability of the lover, set against the wanton cruel power of the beloved. It’s an anguished worldview, which is what spoke so directly to the adolescent reader I was, but no one reads Thomas Mann for woo-woo life-enhancing sentimentality.”↗