Death in Venice

Dying in Venice follows Aschenbach, a writer in his fifties, as he falls in love with Tadzio, a gorgeous young guy he sees and encounters at a hotel in Venice. It was a frantic, one-sided love affair. The passionate Aschenbach is always a distance away, walking, gazing, wondering, and nostalgically, but never getting closer. He pursued the lovely adolescent through the streets of Venice, hoping to catch a glimpse of his heavenly beauty. Only the passion of an artist steeped in beauty can perceive and appreciate every speck of it. And at the end of the voyage, with Aschenbach's silent dying, Death in Venice finds its climax, when the artist entirely surrenders to beauty, enters into the obsession and only death is the end. This pinnacle ending is reminiscent of the man's death in Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark when he has reached the limit of delusion and temptation.

Death in Venice is more than just a wild, deluded love story, it's also a monument to utter beauty, and when people are absorbed in that beauty, they can only go to the end. Aschenbach's death of subjection to love is the pinnacle of so-called beauty. Many generations of readers and reviewers have read Dying in Venice as a work about more than love, but about passion, as Thomas Mann famously observed, "the one who falls in love is more than that," for the spirit is concealed in the lover, not in the beloved. You fall in love means that you enter a wonderful state of illusion.

Detailed information:

Author: Thomas Mann

Publication date: 2012
Genres: Novel
Pages: 152 pp
Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Venice-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486287149