Death in Venice has at times a spellbinding atmosphere. At times it is also displaying Mann's magnificent register of using the language, actually more often than rare, that alone enough to make the book worth reading. But I don't find the story strong and gripping enough. That the main character with the mind and soul of an artist is falling in love with a pretty boy is an interesting angle of approach, and would have been even more chocking to the reader in 1911 when Mann wrote the novella. To me the weakest parts seem to be the beginning of the book, before he is approaching Venice by sea, and the ending of it. On those crucial parts of the book I find Mann as the author and creator too much present, while the fifty pages in the middle are superb craftsmanship, where one is taken away by the atmosphere and his wonderful descriptions. Still, the book is a classic and well worth the reading.

Is there a finer experience than reading Thomas Mann? Death in Venice is his masterpiece, in my view (and arguably, one might add, Britten's greatest opera!), and, though the Russians come to mind, its pages, soaked in the majesty of the greatest art, reveal probably the greatest writing artist of the modern age. Aschenbach's passion is our own dilemma, and no other artist but Thomas Mann could leave him so lean and broken in our arms, and capable by that condition to fill us with consuming humanness. The philosopher Mann takes a language of human wounds and shows us ourselves, giving witness thereby to the essential power of literature. I consider it an act of religion to read Death in Venice every couple years. Religion is where, perhaps, we meet our heart; at the very least, art of this solicitude prompts a kind of faith that we still have one, after the wearing of the years, and all our private griefs. I hope the high schools and colleges are yet keeping Mann near, our children must yet gather and collect the food necessary to feed them all their lives. To 'recommend' this books seems almost pseudo-messianic! but if one commends it, let it be called not the work of a great literary messiah, but the cry of one of our brothers- a cry inextinguishable and provident.

A few pages into this literary classic and one might be tempted to put this novel down in search of less challenging fare. Beginning with an in-depth description of the main character Gustav Aschenbach, the story follows Aschenbach's degeneration from respected moral beacon to a obsessed stalker. After being struck with wonderlust by the sight of a roughened traveller, Aschenbach, a man who has never let himself be free of his own internal discipline, is driven by some inner need to travel to Venice. Once he arrives, Aschenbach begins to loosen decades of emotional repression as he allows his aesthetic appreciation of a fellow vacationer, a young sickly boy, Tadzio, to grow into a lustful obsession. Tadzio's beauty so captures Aschenbach that he ends up dying for his love, as his need to be near the young boy becomes his all-consuming priority. The subject will strike many readers as sickening as we read of a man's lust for a pre-pubescent boy, yet one can appreaciate Mann's remarkable ability with the written word, and the realism he creates as we delve into Aschenbach's mind.