Synopsis (credit/review: back cover)

First published in 1912, Death in Venice tells how Gustave Von Aschenbach, a writer utterly absorbed in his work, arrives in Venice as the result of a 'youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes', and meets a young boy whose beauty he becomes obsessed by.

His pitiful pursuit of the object of his affection and its inevitable and pathetic climax are told here with the particular skill the author has for this shorter form of fiction. Death in Venice is an acknowledged masterpiece of European short fiction and possibly the most artistically perfect of all Mann's works.

On the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die List.

(Bought second-hand at Kloof Street Library, Tamboerskloof.)

The short story is well constructed and, to a large degree, convincing.

Two unrelated excerpts:

Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between people who know each other only by sight — who encounter and observe each other daily, even hourly, and yet are compelled by the constraint of convention or by their own temperament to keep up the pretence of being indifferent strangers, neither greeting nor speaking to each other.

The fruit of solitude is originality, something daringly and disconcertingly beautiful, the poetic creation. But the fruit of solitude can also be the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Some of the themes of the book threaded through the other short stories in the anthology as well.

Donated to Help the Rural Child, a charity second-hand bookshop.

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