The Magic Mountain

Product Details

• Fettle: New
• ISBN13: 9780679772873
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Description

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

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Customer Reviews

different
The book is a new more beat up than I expected, but on the whole, everythings ok. Really good book

2010-07-15 (pasadena,Calif) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Freedom from responsibility
T. Mann is not among my favorite writers, but I can't deny that he was a master of the German language. I can't find anything wrong with his style, other than that it is artificially complicated and inflated with redundancies and an excessive use of monstrous nouns. The German language is flexible in the construction of nouns. Mann's writing was overindulgent in this vice. (If he determined your impression of the German language, maybe during high school struggles, rest assured that Mann's usage was untypical. He was a comedian at heart, with a morbid sense of humor.)

Mann said himself, early in the book, that only long and detailed narrations can be entertaining. He surely strove hard to be entertaining in that sense.
His reputation as a serious writer and as a bore is unfair. He was quite amusing, if often annoying. His way of poking fun is not of the `nice' kind, he does not laugh `with' his victims, but destroys them with his scorn. His mean streak in satirizing people is not an endearing habit. He ridicules not only through descriptions of behavior, looks, and dress, but also by their names: Gerngross (would like to be great), Blumenkohl (cauliflower), Rotbein (red leg), Einhuf (one hoof), and so on and on and on. Real people sometimes have such names, but Mann amasses them and that is meant to be funny.

He mocks. He mocks the medical industry and psycho-analysis. He mocks humanism and progressivism and enlightenment. He mocks science and progress. Was he still stuck in his abominable nationalism of WW1 times or was he mocking himself?
The book has been called a Bildungsroman. Indeed, we follow Hans Castorp's mental development, we watch him discuss politics and philosophies and scientific concepts, we watch him read his way into modern science of the time. But is Mann really interested in the man? I don't think so. Castorp is just a pawn in the larger scope of un-serious world views. Mann never drops the attitude of the outsider who will not be part of anything.

A young man from a Buddenbrookian background, before WW1, visits his cousin in a pulmonary sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, for 3 weeks. The visit turns into months and years, when it is discovered that he is suffering from the same affliction as his cousin.
He soon becomes attracted to a Russian woman who reminds him of a boyish infatuation with a male classmate with similar `Kirgisian' eyes - the homoerotic element was omnipresent in Mann's work. Even the name of the woman (Madame Chauchat) indicates that Hans sees her as an ambivalent creature in the sexual sense: is she a tomcat to him? The chapter Walpurgisnacht (witches' ball) is one of the highlights: during a carnival party at the sanatorium, Hans loosens up under alcohol and starts a real conversation with his flame. She speaks little German, his French is shaky. We observe a hot flirt under precarious conditions. We don't really learn what happened that night. So much is certain: Hans manages to ask Clowdia to lend him her pencil... That was as far as he got with the boy at school 10 years ago. He manages to return Clowdia's pencil before she leaves for home (Daghestan) next day. Use your imagination!

The world of the sanatorium is a microcosm of ideologies and a ship of fools, wrecked on a mountain slope. How marvelous that this could provide material for nearly 1000 pages. A main theme of the ruminations is time. Another theme is the value and role of disease for life. Is it a form of immorality? The deputy chief doctor, with Eastern European accent, delivers lectures on Love and Disease.
Humanist Settembrini is employed by the project of an Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Suffering. His personal contribution will be about world literature and suffering.
Settembrini finds his ideological nemesis in a scholastic dialectician called Naphta, who also provides the occasion for various anti-semitic comments by other people. Mann was himself never quite free from that affliction, despite his own close family affiliation to German Jews.
Naphta turns out to be a prophet of terror, an apologist of totalitarianism. Youth does not want freedom, it wants instruction! Hans feels at home on the magic mountain, as Anselm Eibenschuetz in Joseph Roth's story felt at home in the army.
The Naphta passages are unsatisfactory. They turn the easygoing banter of the Settembrini dialogues into something rather too earnest considering that Mann was never seriously committing himself (other than to his success as a writer). They are cliché-ridden caricatures of the intellectually superior Jesuit of Jewish origin.

A great novel that I do not manage to like wholeheartedly.

2010-04-29 | Hermit (window seat) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Book
Great Book, arrived early,in great condition. This is in the top 100 books you should read before you die. Read it! it will change your soul and you'll find yourself yelling at the characters to act!

2010-02-23 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Excellent
I read this book about ten years ago when I was 21. Mann, Dostoevsky and some other writers of the late 19th and early 20th century posses a singular gift for rendering all that is drab and uninspiring interesting and even original. Mann's keenness as an observer strips the lives of his characters free of all pretense. Each of the characters is endowed with a rich personality, and, at least I think so, we come to see them all as our fellows in life's struggles. What is particularly noticeable is the nearly incomparable expressiveness of Mann's writing. This is definitely the work of a writer at the very peak of his powers as a builder of worlds. In this case, the world is an isolated sanatorium where people, whether there to die or simply to prove that their wealth knows no modesty, enjoy a sort of respite from all the humdrum demands of daily life. Here, in this fragile and moribund world, Mann's characters are free to step out of their customary roles and see whether a different life could agree with them more. Read this book if you want to experience a different world rather than read some words on a piece of paper.

2009-10-20 | Muppet Master (Here) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Magic Mountain Thrills Again
The book came in splendid condition in a short amount of time. I'm completely as engrossed in it as I was when I first read it at 17.

2009-08-24 (Jersey City, NJ USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend

Description

"John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece."  --The New Yorker

"Doctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods." --The New Republic

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul--and the ability to love his fellow man.

Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius--both national and individual--and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist.

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Customer Reviews

An Almost Peerless Book
I haven't read all the other reviews, but I'm amazed at how well-informed and insightful the Dr. Faustus reviews are--much more than those for most of the other books reviewed via Amazon. I have a couple of points to make that I haven't seen, or just have missed.

First, this novel is a very odd instance of a Bildungsroman. As far as I remember [not having read the novel for quite a while], the focal character Adrian hardly changes a darn bit after his teen years, when he already shunned human relationships, laughed delightedly at misbegotten marriages of nature and reason, and was drawn by the alignment of compulsion and creativity in music. Yeah, new stuff happened after that, but it really just extended the clogged stagnation that led Adrian to contemplate a deal with the devil in the first place. On the plane of the soul, I don't see that he froze past his level as a 20-year-old. Admittedly, as he aged he did become more inclined to use and hurt people for his own ends.

Second, unlike some other reviewers, I can't find a trace of optimism in this book. In his early work, Mann explored the clash of art and everyday life. Art was the peak cultural value, opaque to the hearty bourgeois merchant, but essentially unhealthy and corrosive. Mann defended the German side in WWI as the side of humanistic culture as opposed to superficial rationalism. But intellectual work has broad undeniable value. In Dr. Faustus this contrast has shifted: Adrian's counterpoint Serenus Zeitblom represents humanistic values and classical knowledge as well as bourgeois everydayness. That side of the scale, holding traditional Kunstler plus Burger, is presented as a floundering self-critical joke. Serenus rarely achieves serenity, and this educated humanist can't produce a well-structured narrative or even, in some cases, a grammatical sentence. Nothing's left for the intellectual but condescension and self-destruction, parallel to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Now despair as subtly and evocatively developed as in this novel is still amazing and uplifting. For me, Dr. Faustus is matched only by the Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky seems more accessible, perhaps because I'm less aware of my ignorance about Russian intellectual history than about German, so I can't even register the subtleties. Both repay rereading.

2010-06-22 (Phoenix, AZ USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Asking the Right Questions
1929 Literature Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann updated the essentially German Doctor Faustus legend in his 1948 novel of the same name. A well meaning composer sells his soul to the devil in order to produce music beyond any that has been composed before. The twentieth century is surely loaded with talented individuals tempted by the prospect of immortality through innovative works. The result is always disastrous. This book is not simple apologetics - for the Nazis, the Lutherans, the humanists, the university community or the folk. Instead, it is a detailed attempt at finding a way out of humanity's enlightened modern bind as noted on page 122: "the problem of the meaning and fulfillment of existence and a worthy conduct of life is left open, just as open as it is today."

Mann destroys all of the usual suspects and solutions: church, belief, reformation, university, theology, philosophy, individual genius/excellence, humanities, letters, music, science, technology, nation, class, revenge, friendship, abstraction, math, withdrawal, bourgeois culture, sensual pleasures, hedonism, nature, classicism, etc. There is NO simple solution for the masses or even for the enlightened elite!

The destruction of the German national/cultural solution is complete, with the devil entreating the composer on page 223 with "Speak only German! Only good old German without feignedness or dissimulation. I understand it. It happens to be precisely my favoured language."

Mann pecks away at the subjective/objective dimension without finding a solution. He generally ignores some potential modern solutions such as democratic politics, economic growth, trade, entrepreneurship, libertarianism, communities, volunteerism or mysticism.

The author invests many pages describing the potential musical solutions. As in Douglas Hofstadter's much later book on Escher, Gödel and Bach, Mann vaguely understands that extra dimensions and the link between infinity and finiteness provide an opening for a solution. The author suggests the solution of expressivism on page 485: "the highest and profoundest claim of feeling to a stage of intellectuality and formal strictness, which must be arrived at in order that we may ...". Indirectly, Mann posits the solutions of simple rural life, maternal embraces, a child's promise, music as a door opener, good and evil as a paired set, personal relations, paradoxical views, laughter and lamentations.

As noted by other reviewers, this is an extremely difficult and dense book. However, Mann, the mild-mannered philologist, raises the single most important question of his day and ours: "how do we live a life of goodness and meaning?" Mann provides the question, eliminates some false answers and highlights some potential answers. We have a sacred responsibility to find a meaningful answer.

2010-05-31 (Carmel, IN United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus" is a descent into hell amid the dance of thundering flames
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was the 1955 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mann came from the cultured German bourgeoise being raised in the North Sea port of Lubeck. Doctor Faustus is the final novel written by Mann and is the latest chapter in the Faustian legend. Dr. Faustus (the Devil) bargains with gifted but hubritic artists to give Hell their souls in return for a few years of life lived to the full. Previous incarnations of the Faust story have been seen in Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan play; Goethe's Faust Part One and Part II and in Hector Berlioz's opera "The Damnation of Faust" as well as Charles Gonoud's opera "Faust." (the favorite opera of Great Britain's Queen Victoria).
Mann's Doctor Faustus is a long 534 page, densely printed, novel in the Vintage edition translated into readable English by John E. Woods. The book's theme is the destruction of the composer Adrian Leverkuhn as he barters his soul to the Devil in order to be given 24 more years of life. During that time AL becomes world famous as the father of the twelve tone method of musical composition (Mann states that AL is based on the Viennese twelve tone composer Arnold Schoenberg). The life span of the fictional AL is from 1885-1940 taking him from his college career as a theological student at Halle to Leipzig for philosophical and musical mentoring in Munich. Adrian is aloof, cold and obsessed with his art. His state of mind is parallel with that of Germany which fell into total defeat in 1945.
No big wig Nazis or Hitler are mentioned in the book but their sinister shadow oversees the slide
made by Al and Germany into the abyss of collapse.
The story is told by a fictional academic Dr. Serenus Zeitblom who is a teacher and lifelong friend of Adrian.
His narration contains chapters dealing with a wide range of topics from philosophy, theology, the demonic in art,
Zeitblom is, to this reviewer, a portrait of the cultivated German intellectual adrift in the stormy sea of Nazi tempest. Adrian, says Zeitblom, never married but was infatuated with the angelic beauty of his nephew who dies of disease much as all in German cultural lufe was infected by the black death of the black shirted SS thugs.
This is a difficult novel written in an erudite style. Mann is familiar with modern music, art, literature and ancient languages. His book is not for the easily bored or those looking for a story fueled by a good plot. I have read the book three times and have learned new things about life, love, evil and artistic ambition each time I have poured over this tragic tale of a tormented genius. The book is Mann's masterpiece.

2010-01-19 | Michael Mills (Knoxville Tennessee) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Gorgeous binding
Others can tell you what a good book this is. I have to tell you that it is printed on wonderful-feeling smooth paper with a dull-varnished cover and feels soft and weighty and absolutely delightful to hold.

2009-02-26 | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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I didn't want to finish it
It's been a long time since I haven't finished a book, even ones I didn't like. I really enjoyed Goethe's Faust and thought that this book would be a great follow up. I've never read any of Mann's books but I took a shot on this one and wish I didn't.

I found the text to be far too complex and verbose. Way too many charachters to keep track of and very and I mean very little action. It takes halfway into the book before the conversation with Adrian and the Devil takes place and I was hoping that this would make the mostly arduous journey of reading (although the discussions of religion in the fraternity was interesting) the book worth it. But the conversation with the Devil was boring and in my estimation difficult to understand why Adrian was lured.

I read the next chapter and then I realized I don't like this book, I haven't liked this book and drudging through another 200+ pages just to finish it isn't worth it.

2008-11-26 (Miami) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 1

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Death in Venice and Other Stories (Signet Classics)

Product Details

• Adapt: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Coolness, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and repair to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9780451530325

Description

This translation of Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann's work includes his masterpiece, "Death in Venice," plus six of the author's short stories: "Tristan," "Tonio Kroger," "Man and Dog: An Idyll," "Hour of Hardship," "Tobias Mindernickel," and "The Child Prodigy."

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Customer Reviews

Mann's "Death in Venice" and More
Thomas Mann's masterful short novel "Death in Venice" (1912) tells the story of a distinguished German writer, Gustav Aschenbach, who, at the age of 53 while on holiday in Venice, develops a passion for a 14-year old boy named Tadzio. Mann's story sets the demands and powers of eros, human sexuality, in the form of Aschenbach's feelings for Tadzio, against the life, of intellect, discipline, artistic creation, and order which Aschenbach had, before his fateful passion, attempted to realize in his life. Mann's story is highly organized and beautifully controlled, meeting the artistic and intellectual demands of his protagonist, Aschenbach. Yet the story exudes passion and eroticism, in Aschebach's homosexual attraction for a young adolescent, the dank gondolas of Venice, the fetid epidemic that plagues the city, and the atmosphere of death and destruction that Mann captures in his work. The story is full of allusions to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium and, I think, to the Bacchae of Euripides. Mann's story offers a disturbing picture of the claims of sexuality and eroticism, particularly on the life of the mind, and of the consequences of repressing them.

I was grateful for the opportunity to reread "Death in Venice" in a book group, and my understanding of the work was increased by this excellent collection of seven of Mann's early short stories in a volume edited by David Luke. It is available at a modest price. The six other stories in the volume were written earlier than "Death in Venice" and show a unity of theme with this great work. Each of the stories juxtaposes the life of the artist, the outsider trying to observe and understand, with the claims of passion. The artists involved, the passions, and the results differ among the stories, but the underlying theme remains the same.

"Tonio Kroger" (1903), an extended short story, shows an aspiring writer infatuated in his youth with a school friend and, subsequently, with the girl his friend marries. He years to be part of what he deems "the bright children of life, the happy, the charming, and the ordinary" while recognizing that this is not to be for him. "Tonio Kroger" was Mann's own favorite among his works and it presents the theme of "Death in Venice" -- intellect and passion in a different way and light.

The extended story "Tristan" (1903) also is based upon a conflict over a young woman, set in a sanitorium, between a dandified writer and her business-like matter-of-fact husband. Mann's love for Wagner and for music are also at the center of this story.

The remaining four stories also develop the theme of passion as a disturbing force in what appears to be a settled life. I particularly enjoyed the short opening work, "Little Herr Friedemann" (1897) in which a young man who becomes hunchbacked and reserved as a result of an accident in infancy is humiliated and rejected when he feels the stirrings of passion in the person of a beautiful 24 year old married woman.

In delving into the force eroticism exerts on human life, Mann's stories explore a theme which resonates deeply with me and with many readers. This book, with Luke's translation and introduction, is an excellent way of getting to know Mann's stories.

Robin Friedman

2006-08-14 (Washington, D.C. United States) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 5

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Wagner never sounded so good
I know two Germans, both of whom read a great deal- one of them taught the language to me for two semesters; the other I know via the internet. Each of them seems to have very different ideas about their own culture. For instance, one insists that Goethe is over-rated and should not be read; the other promises me that he is the bedrock of that countries literature. Who to believe? I'm still trying to make my mind up...

However, both of them insisted that I read Thomas Mann.

They couldn't have been more right. To you, the potential reader, I want to pass on that advice: read Thomas Mann. Read him and reread him and study him. Do it with this book, the Bantam publication translated by David Luke.

Thomas Mann had an intelligence about his writing that can only be appreciated fully firsthand. This is not light material by any stretch of the imagination but neither is it so dense that it can't be understood or gotten through. The fact is that its perfect; it sits just right in your mind, beckoning you on page by page, intricately constructing the internal rhythm of its characters and their dilemmas in such a way that you find yourself hypnotized, pouring through the pages then digesting those over a period of several weeks as the moods he has created stick with you. The material haunts you; it grabs hold of your imagination in such a way that a deep footprint will be forever left.

Take the story of `Tonio Kruger' for example. Inside the material there are repetitions which occur, turns of phrases that are presented in happy times, then echoed later to recall to the reader, albeit almost subconsciously, those earlier moments. These little flourishes in the language are the craft of a man who took his work very seriously, presenting the writing as well as the subject as part of the experience. Anyone who has read Flaubert knows what pains some authors take in this striving for the bon mot; Mann is such an author, a person who writes at all levels; plot, character, technical presentation, and theme.

This is to say that the other pieces of the fiction (plot; characterization) work as well as these little technical echoes. The story `Tristan' is a good example: after finishing this one, try to erase from your mind the image of the writer pleading with the sickened wife to play the piano. Try to wipe away the lilt of language, the turn and tilt that bring to mind the piece by Wagner, a sound that you can almost hear in the just the words themselves. I assure you, it will stick to you. If you want to do any writing yourself you will find your mind wandering over this passage, trying to discern how it is that Mann achieved this feat in mere language.

And this brings me to another reason to buy this book- David Luke. Mr. Luke does a splendid rendering of the material, a translation that does not dumb it down, that is very conscious of the work and its brevity and that takes great pains to make sure to convey as many levels of the work to the reader as is possible. One good example- at one point a German word is used that can have more than one meaning in the context (Geist); this is noted at the bottom of the page instead of being accounted into the translation itself. Doing this instead of writing both contexts into the text gives the reader an appreciation for the original work that could not be had otherwise.

The introduction is splendid as well. In 50 pages Mr. Luke covers a brief synopsis of each of the stories, recounting to the reader what should be noted so that the brilliance of the work becomes more evident (I will admit, I did not notice the repetitions myself...). I would advise (as with any introduction) that this part should be read last; it contains spoilers that could curtail the experience of a fresh reading.

Bottom line: Add this to your collection of paperbacks. Each story is worth the price of the book as a whole and the fact that they can all be had so cheap leaves little reason not to buy it.

-LP

2006-07-11 (Concord, NC) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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The Sorrows of Youth
All of these stories were written when Mann was in his early twenties, and he always felt he would never surpass them. It is not hard to see why; they are suffused with the intensity and bitter-sweetness of despair that only youth can bring. By turns tragic and comic, the dark corners of Venice shall linger in the mind long after you have turned the page.

2006-02-09 (Portsmouth, OH) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Art as a way of life
This collection of Thomas Mann's novellas and short stories thematically exhibits the alienation of being a passionate artist in a bourgeois society. "We artists despise no one more than the dilettante, the man of life who thinks that in his spare time, on top of everything else, he can become an artist," the title character tells a sympathetic friend in "Tonio Kroger," a story which seems at least partially autobiographical. Tonio, who has become a renowned writer as an adult, recalls an instance when he was a boy in which he tried to entice the interest of a friend -- a popular, athletic boy, everything that Tonio was not -- by enthusiastically explaining to him the plot of Schiller's "Don Carlos." The attempt was futile, however, and Tonio was left spiritually alone with his unusual love of literature.

"Tristan" takes the artist-bourgeois conflict to a setting that presages Mann's definitive novel "The Magic Mountain." The protagonist, an offbeat writer named Spinell confined to a tuberculosis sanatarium, takes an interest in a fellow patient, a businessman's wife who, he discovers, is a sensitive and tasteful amateur pianist. He writes her husband a derogatory letter, deploring him as a philistine who does not deserve to share his life with this secretly artistic woman, which results in a heated confrontation between the two men. In "The Child Prodigy," Mann's tone turns satirical as he focuses on an eight-year-old concert pianist giving an electrifying public performance to an audience whose various reactions -- wonder, jealousy, indifference -- are reflections upon themselves more so than on the performer.

"Death in Venice" is the boldest piece in this collection, unambiguously presenting homosexuality in an artistically positive light but also showing something of a German fascination with Italian culture and scenery. Gustav Aschenbach, the protagonist, again seems to reflect Mann to an extent as a middle-aged, widowed, respected author from Munich who becomes infatuated with a teenage boy while vacationing in Venice. Whether this love ever becomes mutual or physical is not as important as the mood Mann invokes about European cultural and moral decadence, possibly symbolized by the cholera epidemic that sweeps through the city.

"Man and Dog: An Idyll" is a brilliant meditation on the narrator's affectionate and occasionally difficult relationship with his pet pointer and also allows a glimpse of life in the industrialized and suburbanized Germany of the early twentieth century. To say that Mann gives the dog a human personality may seem a cliche, but few writers could achieve his level of empathy in relating a dog's behavior and desires in man's terms without resorting to outright personification. A disturbing inversion of this story is told in "Tobias Mindernickel," in which a lonely old man, given no personal background by Mann, ostracized in his neighborhood by adults and taunted by children, buys a dog and demands from it the obedience and respect he has never earned from people.

Mann is truly one of the most important figures in twentieth century literature. What he chose to portray, and the talent with which he portrayed it, brighten the legacy of a century that threatened to destroy art in so many ways for so many insane reasons.

2004-02-21 (Maryland) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Art and Time in Italy
The shorter tales are good but are really like imperfect sketches made in study for the grand finale piece Death in Venice. Most of the tales deal with sensual longing which is never satisfied or consummated and that gets a bit tiring unless you see the sensual longing representing some higher longing as well, the sensual longing perhaps being one in the same with spiritual and artistic longing. That way you are more in the frame of mind to see that Death in Venice is not just about an older mans lust for a younger man but a prolonged meditation about time and art and all those highly valued goods. I have to confess I get tired of Mann pretty quick because he dwells on the same themes over and over again but if you are a student of fiction he really is one of those writers who has much to teach. Still it sometimes seems to me that Mann's characters would be better off if they occasionally just went ahead and did it. That may sound to be an awful oversimplification but I think they would feel better and their already instable identities and worlds would not constantly be shaken to the ground by those too long suppressed desires. As for the spirit and artistic sense, they too would be happier, much more contented, with the occasional release and renewal of energies, a bit of fleshen contact would connect them to something more real than their "thoughts" about things. Anyway if you haven't already read Death in Venice you are lucky because it is a great read, though a strange and sometimes disturbed one. If you like your main characters made of more earthy substance than Mann's suffering spirits read D.H. Lawrence who also loved Italy by the way and who contemplated time and art in a much more relaxed manner.

2001-10-06 (Miami Beach, Florida United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Description

Key dimensions of Thomas Mann's writing and life are explored in this collection of specially commissioned essays. In addition to introductory chapters on all the main works of fiction and the essays and diaries, there are four chapters examining Mann's oeuvre in relation to major themes. A final chapter looks at the pitfalls of translating Mann into English. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading.

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Death in Venice

Description

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."

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Customer Reviews

A little repetative at times but no the less a Classic Read
A death in Venice is a classic story which I recommend to those seeking this literary category. The book gets repetative at times with Gustav's obsession over the boy, but that's what forces the reader to stay glued to the plot.

2009-12-03 (New England) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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A Plague on Both City and Artist
A famous German writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, a lonely intellectual, goes to the Lido in Venice to escape from his depressing, repetitive existence. In the luxurious Hotel des Bains where Mann wrote and set his story, Aschenbach sees a Polish family that has a fourteen year old boy who is a beauty, a work of art.
Having seen the hotel in my visit to Venice in November of 2007, I was anxious to reread the novella. I must say that I was disappointed. At times the story is like a philosophical treatise, essayistic, more abstract with less narrative drive than a fictional work usually possesses. The story gets bogged down at crucial junctures although the narrative velocity does accelerate and heighten toward the end.
The story is subtle, ambiguous, indeed murky at times. Bear in mind as you read that the book was written in 1913; it is not about a simple sexual attraction or licentiousness. The story is multi-leveled, a philosophical quest and pursuit of the ideal of beauty. The book is not an easy read with its mythological references, digressions, and overwrought prose style.
The city is infested; Aschenbach's brain is infected with thoughts of the boy Tadzio. The manner in which Mann describes the growing pestilence and the decay in the city and the conspiracy of silence by the merchants afraid to scare away the tourists is richly evocative, very well crafted. It is an overheated atmosphere and foul air is being brought by the sirocco, the wind coming in from Africa. The writer makes every preparation to leave after being told to do so, but it is the vision of the boy that draws him back. He is completely under a spell.
Aschenbach wants to get his own youth back; he has his hair dyed and curled, and wears lipstick and jewelry. The boy is aware of him, but does not flirt with him nor try to entice him. The vitality of the youth is in stark contrast to the writer's psychological impotence and physical decline.
Some readers may see in it a tragedy, but it is more akin to pathos. We never see Tadzio's inner persona; he is the person seen and admired from the writer's perspective for his godlike beauty, and that is an advantage. Aschenbach arrived in the Lido in a black coffin-like gondola, so we have a feeling that this trip to the Lido is going to be a transcendent journey for the artist.

2007-12-13 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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transcendant translation
A writer who undertakes to translate a complicated and nuanced work by an acknowledged literary master puts himself into an unenviable position, especially should the work have already been previously translated by another and be considered definitive. And yet Heim's update on the classic Lowe-Porter translation has made Mann's Aschenbach more fully human, more tragic and less comic, still every bit as pompous and self-justifying, more insidiously real. It's a triumph of the translator's art.

To me, anyhow, Mann's book has always been at least as much about the language, the inner self-talk of Aschenbach, as it has been about the story line or plot. It is fascinating to see how the author enters the mind of a man who has spent his life in rigid self-denial, self-deception really, and slowly - and not without considerable struggle from his ego against it - expands his consciousness. By book's end Aschenbach has not only found himself, he can no longer deny himself, he accepts himself as he is and then of course he dies. The journey he undertakes - not just from serious and constricted Germany to a holiday resort on the Lido in Venice, but from stuffy and self-important man living a lie, a life of 'despites', to allowing himself to be fully conscious of one true emotion and impulse and allowing it, even willing it to take him entirely over, to free him from himself, is the thing.

Well, it's a spellbinding book, and one which rewards close rereading.

2005-11-29 | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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A 21st Century Facelift For a Classic (Ink Fresh But Dried)
I don't have much more to add to Grady Harp's effusive praise, except to say that I pretty much agree with his main points. I first read the classic H.T. Lowe Porter translation in college and liked it then . . . anything for a thorough expose of what it means--or necessarily used to mean--to be gay and aging. Even Lowe Porter's fusty Edwardian strains, imparting dignity and Olympian tragedy to the drama, seemed apt at the time for a life--in the middle of another pestilence--that seemed to offer no happy ending.

But since then we've had Will and Grace and countless gay characters, mostly minor, in films and on TV--and one of the great things is that it's okay to laugh about it all. Even at what we in the community used to call tragic and sometimes in our bitchier moments still do. This translation invites us to smile, and even occasionally howl. By giving Aschenbach an obsession with the Greek gods (toward the end he uses the words god and godlike about a dozen times in two pages), Mann not only shows us what was required at the time as a good alibi or cover for homosexual tendencies (not even "identities")--"classical culture" and "noble classicism" and so on: everything that involved nude boys and swimming hole frolics and attention served to youth and beauty in young beauties--but also gave us in the future (inadvertantly, I don't know, since I don't read German) the keys to understanding a period in which so-called bourgeois culture needed its literature and high art to justify the ancients' curious sexual habits. An almost neurasthenic obsession with youth and health and beauty being an ironic side feature of cultured life.

The result for Mann, in one instance, is a wonderfully dry scene in which the old writer goes to the barber and frowns at his "pinched face" in the mirror, thereby unleashing a torrent of rationales from the barber for working his own art on the aging artist: dye job, little curl here and there, rouge. It's an astoundingly paced and worded moment, and what it leads up to is more dramatic and complex than I remembered in the most famous version. It's not so much about loneliness and a necessarily tragic life, it turns out in this makeover, as about the way we hide ourselves, cloak ourselves, in the identities the world wants to see. That's the tragedy Mann's getting at. Now the yellowing lenses of post-Victorianism have been lifted to reveal this more clearly.

So, three cheers for Michael Henry Heim--and five stars!

2004-06-24 | michael carroll (new york, new york United States) | Helpful Votes: 17 | Rating: 5

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A New Translation: DEATH IN VENICE more radiant than ever!
For those legions of readers who consider Thomas Mann's DEATH IN VENICE one of the pinnacles of 20th Century literature, welcome to the feast! Michael Henry Heim has restudied and again translated this brief but poignant novella with an English version more in tune with Mann's novella and certainly, finally free from all the societal homophobic restrictions that have shrouded previous translations. This is the tale of a writer - Gustav von Aschenbach - in his fifties who feels the need for exotic travels to break his writer's block, and after many aborted attempts to find the right place, comes to Venice and not only falls under its spell but also finds his sublimated desires for pure beauty as focused on young men awakened in his encounter with the young Polish boy Tadzio. This story has been translated into other languages, transformed into film by Luchino Visconti and made into the last opera of Sir Benjamin Britten. But though the simple story has captivated our minds for many years, it has never been presented in so eloquent a fashion as in this Heim translation. To wit: "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, over refinement, lethargy, and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender." When he first encounters Tadzio "...he was infused with a paternal affection, the attraction that one who begets beauty by means of self-sacrifice [a writer] feels for one who is inherently beautiful." And "Was it not common knowledge that the sun diverts our attention from the intellectual to the sensual? It benumbs and bewitches both reason and memory such that the soul in its elation quite forgets its true nature and clings with rapt delight to the fairest of sun-drenched objects, nay, only with the aid of the corporeal can it ascend to more lofty considerations."

Once von Aschenbach accepts the fact that he is in love with the idea of Tadzio he sets about to quash rumors of the threat that cholera is invading Venice to keep his Polish lad from leaving the city (and von Aschenbach) with his family. "Thus the addled traveler could no longer think or care about anything but pursuing unrelentingly the object that had so inflamed him, dreaming of him in his absence, and, as is the lover's wont, speaking tender words to his mere shadow. Loneliness, the foreign environment, and the joy of a belated and profound exhilaration prompted him, persuaded him to indulge without shame or remorse in the most distasteful behavior, as when returning from Venice [to the Lido] late one evening he had paused at the beautiful boy's door on the second floor of the hotel and pressed his forehead against the hinge in drunken rapture, unable to tear himself away even at the risk of being discovered and caught."

Has Heim 'changed' Mann's story in to a more titillating one? No, indeed not! But he has rescued it from the mere Apollonian/Dionysian rhetoric with which other translations have cloaked the sensual aspects of the story. Here von Aschenbach becomes a fully three-dimensional character, one whose life up to the entry into Venice is understood and appreciated as a writer of brilliance, and one whose epiphany of the Eros submerged in this intellectual psyche blossoms in the most credible, tender way that far from being transformed into a 'pedophile', he is instead in that wondrous plane where awakened emotions of love and longing dwell.

Michael Cunningham has written a beautiful introduction to this new translation and, as we have come to expect from this contemporary gifted man of letters, his words are warm and befitting his admiration for this work by Thomas Mann. This is a book to be read and read again, and should you have other versions of DEATH IN VENICE in your library, that is all the more reason to pleasure your mind with the genius of this translation. Highly recommended!

2004-06-19 (Los Angeles, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 18 | Rating: 5

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Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (Everyman's Library)

Description

Introduction by T. J. Reed; Translation by John E. Woods

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Customer Reviews

Life in a Northern Town (a young adult novel)
Thomas Mann was in his early 20s when he wrote this novel. It brought him huge success. It was the starting basis for a great literary career and he achieved many more great things, but, as he well knew himself, the Buddenbrooks remained his most popular book `at home'. Not that his home town Luebeck or his distinguished family of merchants, consuls and senators were too happy with the book. It was too flippant, not serious enough, it laid a blanket of mild ridicule over the surface of respect and veneration. Mann was certainly not a revolutionary, but neither did he fit in very well with respectability. He was something like an upper class bohemian. I doubt that he was ever really `young'.

Reading, or rather re-reading this novel is part of my tour through some of the great German writing. Some of the things that I had liked at the previous visit have faded a bit (like Grass' Tin Drum), others have staid on their peak (like Alexanderplatz), and yet others grow, like Radetzkymarsch. Buddenbrooks has also grown on me. It is a young book for aging people like me. It fits in well with the Victorian novels that I started reading lately.

What is it about? Published at the start of the 20th century, it takes us back to earlier decades of the 19th. It starts with a housewarming party at the new residence of Consul Buddenbrook, grain merchant in Luebeck, and on the upswing. The family has taken over a mansion from another family who was on the way down. Mann makes us expect a downward trend right from the start. Actually the book's subtitle announces it: Decline of a family.
The dinner is taking place in 1835. The respectable citizens discuss politics. A hot subject is the new German Tariff Union, dominated by Prussia. Should the independent northern cities join? Opinions are as divided as they are about new policies on pragmatic, industry-oriented education reform, as they are, with a look back, about the lasting effects of Napoleon: hero or villain?

From here we move through four decades with the change of generations: the leadership in the firm changes hands from the old Johann to the young Johann to first son Thomas, each with their different leadership styles and life outlook. The firm's luck waxes and wanes. Kids grow up and develop their individuality. People get married, some with luck, some not. One of the core stories is the history of mesalliances of Antonie, called Tony.

Politics are always in the background, since Mann is more a psychologist than a politician.1848 passes Luebeck by like a thunderstorm, with some excitement but little consequence. (What do you want, people? We want a republic! But you have a republic already! Then we want another republic!) We live through the 3 German wars in the 1860s: first Prussia and Austria together against Denmark, then the `brother war' of Prussia against Austria, then Prussia against France, which leads to the German Empire under the Hohenzollern dynasty.

The pace in this long tale (750 pages in my pocket book) is fast and never boring. Mann had not yet found his later habit of injecting his ponderous philosophizing, which can be quite trying. Mann already was a master psychologist at his young age. He was deeply inside the minds of his people. He was a mocker already. He mocked each and every one, and some were not happy to find their caricatures in the book.

His opinion of the moral fibre of the good wealthy people of the Hanse City is nicely summarized in the attitude of Consul Buddenbrook towards the emotional outbursts of his fraudulent son in law: when the young man threatens to kill himself if he can't have Tony for his wife, her father is moved enough to put pressure on her to marry the guy; when the son in law later threatens to kill himself unless his father in law saves his financial standing by injecting 120,000 Marks into his firm, father refuses. Which means Tony is worth less than 120,000 Marks. Clean calculation.

Another permanent theme is rumors, gossip, reputation. Tony enters into her second disastrous marriage because `people' make her feel pressure to clean up her image after a divorce. That must be whitewashed with come what may.
Tony is a main character in the novel. She is not in all respects a nice person, she is arrogant and conceited, but we can't but love her spirit of mockery, like when she teases her pious mother's many friends among pastors. There is more than one minor variation on the Elmer Gantry type. We also have to pity her, as after all she was pushed into both her debacles against her own instincts.

The Buddenbrooks are great fun by an author whose international fame is not so much resting on his ability to entertain.

2010-07-25 | Hermit (window seat) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A Very Dull Read
The book is well written but it is a very dull read. Because I had paid money for my copy, I persevered and completed reading it.

2010-05-14 | Thomas S Brizendine (Bowling Green, KY 42104) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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A magnificent masterpiece of literature. Amazing, he was but 24 when it was published!
A work of this depth, breadth and insight is usually attained and even then only rarely by authors of greater years.

There is enough in here for a dozen novels and for a dozen re-readings without fear of exhausting the contents in terms of food for thought.

2009-10-01 (Readalot, US of A) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Decline and fall of a bourgeois family
French literature of or about the XIX Century deeply explored the rise of the bourgeoisie over the nobility. Think of Balzac and Proust. But it was this book, published at the turn of the XX Century, which first explored in a comparable depth the decline and fall of a bourgeois family, amidst social unrest. This is the epic story of the Buddenbrook family through four generations. This was a family who had greatly prospered in the free city of Lübeck, in Northern Germany. They were a family of merchants and naval entrepreneurs, deeply rooted in the Protestant ethics of Weberian fame. They were very religious and hard workers. The novel begins with a scene of family bliss: old Johann Buddenbrook has purchased a new house, a big, beautiful one, and the family is gathered. They are celebrating economic and social success. There is Jean, the son and partner, his distinguished wife, and their three children, their and their grandparents' joy and pride. Thomas is a serious and noble boy; Christian is a troublemaker; and little Tony is a hardnosed girl, also naughty but always good in the end. The novel continues telling the story of the upbringing of the three kids and the people around them. The old folk die, and the younger begin to go out to the world. Thomas reveals as an excellent businessman, in the tradition of his forebearers, has a good marriage and gets elected as senator of the city, which he celebrates by moving into a spectacular new house. Christian becomes a ne'er-do-well, a drunkard and a useless guy. In fact he becomes pathetic and hypochondriac. and the pretty Tony experiences tragedy and bad marriages. The decline continues.

There is no point in elaborating on the complex, tight plot. It is a multilayered bovel, with some side stories, but always a straight language and an easy to read style, with no experimentalisms. Mann is a very skilled narrator, and his first novel shows him already in full possession of his art. Character development is very good, and his Realism gives no quarter. Mann illustrates some fifty years, starting in 1835, in the life of this interesting city, one of the cradles of modern commerce, finance, and Capitalism in general. Along with the Buddenbrooks, we experience the profound changes the city undergoes. Business, politics, religion, music, family life and social relationships are all explored. A great fresco of life, by the guy who would later pen "The Magic Mountain" and "Doktor Faustus", philosophical and chornological sequels of this excellent novel.

2007-05-09 (Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Just not worth the time
I thought this book was very well written and entertaining but just too long. If you love Mann then read this book, if not, then just read Magic Mountain or Death in Venice.

I've decided to elaborate on my review.

The reason why I think this book is not worth the time is because the topic is too narrow. For the average reader, this book's focus on a German upper-middle class family from the turn of the twentieth century might not grab their attention and hold it for 736 pages. I am interested in German history and culture yet I found myself struggling through sections. I think many people who are introduced to Mann by this work may dismiss him because this book failed to really capture their imagination. For this reason, I think many people can skip this particular work.

As I said I found the book to be quite interesting throughout, but there were sections that did not add to the book. No one but the true Mann fan will read about some of this family's daily minutia completely enthralled. I am a fan of Mann and I certainly had problems with some of the work. I think the book would have been just as good if not better with fewer pages. The book would at least be more accessible if it were shorter.

The writing is superb, the story is very compelling at times and I am glad I read Buddenbrooks, but I can certainly sympathize with some of the negative reviews for this book and I would not recommend this book for any of my friends unless they like Mann to begin with. If I were not interested in Germany, I may have put this book down way before the final page.

2007-03-27 | Roger Mexico (TN USA) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 3

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