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Although there are points of more or less rapid change, I don’t think there’s any sharp division into “early” and “late” periods.īut Mann and James achieve their effects quite differently. In both instances, the style evolves and enables the author to deal in rich ambiguities. In your book you write, “To record the experiences of his author-protagonist Aschenbach, Mann crafted a new prose style, increasing the length and syntactic complexity of his sentences, the richness of his vocabulary.” Was this somewhat like the difference between the early and later works of Henry James?
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By contrast, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka were on the verge of publishing their first notable works: Swann’s Way would appear in 1913, Dubliners in 1914, Metamorphosis in 1915, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. Musil had published a controversial early novel ( The Confusions of Young Törless), but his vast, unfinished masterpiece ( The Man without Qualities) would only appear many years later. By 1912, Mann had already had one major success ( Buddenbrooks) and had followed it up with an influential novella ( Tonio Kröger). His great contemporaries were Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Robert Musil. How old was he and who were comparable writers of the time? You start out your book with a bit of scene setting about Thomas Mann’s life in 1911–1912, the period he worked on and published Death in Venice. There are other masterpieces, too, for example, Joseph and his Brothers (a tetralogy which is really neglected these days). The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus would have to be on anyone’s list of the 50 great novels in world literature. Buddenbrooks is the great 19th century German novel (even though it was published in 1901 - German literature was late in moving into the nineteenth century).
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I’m not sure how many American readers read Mann these days - when I was young, he was clearly viewed as one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, and much more accessible than Proust or Joyce. It’s brilliantly written and fascinatingly many-sided. It’s been translated into English many times, and some of the recent translations (those of David Luke, Clayton Koelb, and Michael Heim) are excellent. Visconti delivers a haunting piece of cinema, a true emotional experience, a masterpiece.Death in Venice is one of the great pieces of short fiction in any language.
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Does von Aschenbach desire Tadzio or is he fascinated by what he represents: Perfect Beauty? The challenge of Luchino Visconti was to apply a superb cinematography and a precise narrative method to a film that in nature deals with complex concepts. The Young Tadzio blows away this certitude. The notion of Desire which leads to the understanding of the main questioning: for Aschenbach, Perfection is reached through hard work it is a consequence not a fact. The notion of isolation right from the beginning emphases by the personality of Aschenbach himself and showed by Visconti as someone cold and rigid and therefore alone. The notion of Urgency reinforced by an avoidable sorrow as Von Aschenbach realizes he is getting old in the hair dresser scene. All the notions that build up to the main questioning are revealed during this quest for Perfection and this race against Death. In this Venice, marked by Death and cursed by the plague, the Time is running out and the fascinating quest for Perfection finally appears to be a dangerous game to play. At first von Aschenbach does not understand why the perfection of the form in his musical composition does not lead to the perfection of his symphony and therefore lose himself in a quest for Beauty following the young Tadzio as not only a symbol for this ultimate Beauty / Perfection but also as the Mask of Death. Perfection, Beauty is a chimer, pursuing it is pursuing Death as Time is passing by. Indeed the film is based on an equation between Death and Beauty as an aphorism for Perfection and in which the results is Time (or the lack of it). Often reduced and presented as a decadent film in which homosexuality and pedophilia are the main themes, the novel like the movie deals in fact with a much more complex and powerful dynamic. Visconti himself who decided to focus on the Venice chapter only as well as to modify the occupation of the main protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach who becomes a music composer (highly inspired by the composer Mahler), the film was also inspired by other Thomas Mann's novel like 'Doctor Faustus' or by Marcel Proust's writing. Based on Thomas Mann's 1913 classic novella of the same name, the film not only capture the quintessential of the novel but also reinforce a powerful questioning through superb visuals. Luchino Visconti's 'Death in Venice' is one of the most misunderstood masterpieces of cinema.