Death in Venice (German 1912, English 1925) By Thomas Mann

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann is a literary classic I am almost embarrassed to say I had never read before this week; nor had I ever seen Luchino Visconti’s film adaption of it, considered by many an Art film masterpiece.  Still controversial today, Death in Venice most have been explosive when first published in Germany in 1912, even as carefully written as it is.

The story, in an oh so brief summary, tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author (composer in the movie) living in Munich who has writer’s block and is in poor health.  His friends and doctor order him to take a sabbatical.  He tries a number of locales but ends up taking a holiday trip to Venice.  He arrives during a “scirocco,” a late summer storm.

 

There are two major plots: his obsession with a beautiful teenager, and a cholera epidemic in the city.

Aschenbach checks into the luxurious Grand Hotel des Bains on Lido, Venice’s offshore beach resort. At the Hotel he notices a blonde and slim teenage boy, the very definition of the ancient Greek “classic beauty” [I disagree]. The boy is vacationing in Venice with his mother and siblings.  Aschenbach, a widower, becomes obsessed with the boy, whose name he finds out is Tadzio, and begins to follow his every move.  Tadzio notices, responding at first with nervous curiosity, and then with seductive teasing.  Importantly, they never connect or even speak.

When I say the book, published in 1912 is carefully written, I mean Mann’s narrative, considered semi-autobiographical, is that Aschenbach is enchanted by the boy as a personification of artistic beauty, not as a sex object.  Today, one would lean toward calling him a pederast.

Aschenbach is also concerned about growing old, and worried about his health.  When he notices people beginning to die suddenly, and sanitation notices going up around Venice he begins asking the hotel staff and local merchants what is going on.  They all recite the party line, that “these kind of orders are issued all the time to combat the ill effects of the heat and scirocco."  Finally, a manager at the  currency exchange recites the party line, but then pulls him behind closed doors to whisper to him that the city is experiencing a cholera outbreak and tells Aschenbach that he should leave town immediately.  Asked why the authorities are not informing people, the manager tells him that to do so would be bad for our tourist economy.  He decides to leave.

 

Death in Venice 1971 Movie Trailer

When Aschenbach returns to the Hotel he decides to must tell Tadzio’s mother she must take her family away from Venice as quickly as possible.  But by the time he works up the nerve to risk talking to Tadzio's mother, he discovers they are already preparing to leave.  All will depart at Noon.  Aschenbach goes out to the beach to pass time until the launch will pick him up and take him to the train station.  In a very memorable closing movie scene, Aschenbach dies in his beach chair while watching Tadzio walking into the water.

Recommendation:  Yes, for literature buffs, both book and the 1971 movie.

They Came Like Swallows (1937) By William Maxwell

In 1937 William Maxwell penned a book about the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic mostly as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy named Bunny, and his twelve-year-old brother Robert. The story was set in small town central Illinois, where Maxwell grew up. The book, They Came Like Swallows, is short at 124 pages, but captures a hugely significant story. The title is inspired by William Butler Yeats’s classic poem Coole Park because it encapsulates the boys’ mother so perfectly.

                They came like swallows and like swallows went,

                And yet a woman’s powerful character

                Could keep a swallow to its first intent,

                And half a dozen in formation there,

                That seemed to wheel upon a compass point,

                Found certainty upon the dreaming air.

I read this book several years ago, although beautifully written, I basically cast it off as “ancient history” and forgot about it. Today, it re-reads as “current events.”  The course of the Spanish Influenza ran from 1918 through 1919, killing an estimated 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans, 5-times the death toll of US soldiers who died in World War I, which ran concurrently.

Today (April 24, 2020) just over a century later -- and only 3 months into the Covid-19 pandemic – 2.8 million people have been diagnosed worldwide, with 202,000 having died.  In the U.S. 52,234 people have already died.  After the first wave of infections, if history repeats, a second wave of the pandemic will occur, and absent a vaccine, will be far more deadly.

The effectiveness of Maxwell’s book is that he did not write to shock the reader with statistics, he wrote about one family, in one small Midwestern town. 

Of pointed significance in the book is that some of the actions used in 1918 to effectively slow the epidemic are being used again today, and meeting the same resistance, such as school closings.  When Bunny becomes ill, his mother’s lament is “If I’d only taken Bunny out of school when the epidemic first started.”  When Robert is told that he can’t leave the yard, his response “What good was having school closed?  What good was all the time in the world? So long as he had to stay in his own yard, what good was anything.”  The rumors spreading through town then was that the influenza was sent to the U.S. by German submarines.  Today, it is the Chinese.  And ministers, ordered not to hold public services, then like now, complaining about religion being more important that some disease, and God will protect them.

Recommendation:  Absolutely.

Seven Gothic Tales (1934) By Isak Dinesen

My definition of “gothic” leans toward horror stories, i.e. The House of Seven Gables.  But Gothic literature is much broader, characteristics of which include: “death and decay, haunted homes/castles, family curses, madness, powerful love/romance, ghosts and vampires” and all things supernatural.  In a manner, Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dineson touches on all of those, with a heavy dose of religion.

A collection of short stories, Seven Gothic Tales was the first commercially successful book written by Isak Dinesen, better known for her biographical book Out of Africa, and later in her career Babette’s Feast – both more famous today as movies, than as books. 

Isak Dinesen, was one of the pseudonyms used by Karen Blixen-Finecke (1885 – 1962).  She was born and raised in Denmark and spent 20 years of her married life in Kenya.  She was multi-lingual, and largely picked her pseudonym based on what language she was writing in/publishing for.

Included in the collection are:

The Deluge at Norderney has a meandering plot set during a severe late-season storm centered at a seaside (Baltic) resort hotel.   Guests attempt an escape via boat as the town is flooding.  In departing they come across a woman and her children standing on a barn which is rapidly being submerged by the water.  Several volunteers on the boat swap places with the family, agreeing to risk the night staying in the barn awaiting rescue in the morning.  The characters include an aristocratic woman, a Catholic Cardinal, and others.  Their secret identities and pasts are the tale.

The Old Chevalier set in 1874 Paris, tells of a young man walking home after being dumped by the married woman he’s been having a several months affair with.  Depressed and drunk he meets a young lady on the street and takes her home for a one-night stand.  After she leaves in the early morning, he realizes that he can’t live without her, he spends all of the next days searching the streets for her, with no success.  Fifteen years later, he comes across an artist’s painting of her, but is still unable to find out her identify.

The Monkey clearly fits the gothic elements of supernatural, with a heavy religious subset.  A young man has come to visit his aunt, the Virgin Prioress of Closter Seven, a Lutheran convent.  He seeks her advice on marriage, and she instantly takes charge of finding him a suitable bride.  She arranges to hook him up with a young woman who will be the heiress to a neighboring estate.  Following his aunt’s advice, the arranged date goes horribly astray (he pounced, as Sally would say in Cabaret), though not near as horrible as the confrontation they have with the aunt in the morning.

The Road Round Pisa is long-winded, convoluted, and dumb. A man has been given a small “smelling bottle” with a heart-shaped drawing of an idyllic country estate on it by his maiden aunt.  Throughout his childhood he has heard romantic stories told by his aunt with the estate being the setting.  After her death, he travels to Italy in search of the estate painted on the bottle.  A coach accident leads him to make a dying woman a promise to find her daughter before she dies.

(My favorite) The Supper at Elsinore takes place on the NE coast of Denmark (as a reader of Hamlet would be able to tell you).  There, the DeConink family has kept a large old home near the harbor for several generations. A caretaker lives in the home.  The only remaining members of the family, two unwed sisters now into middle-age, have moved to Copenhagen.  They have/had a brother who went to sea on the eve of his wedding day and is rumored to have become a pirate.  He is presumed dead.  In the story, the caretaker has seen his ghost in the old house and gone to Copenhagen to fetch the sisters back to the old house for a conversation with him.   

The Dreamers is interesting, yet another long-winded tale.  It takes place in 1863 aboard a dhow (a small craft boat) off the coast of Zanzibar.  The boat’s passengers are an escaped political prisoner and his friends who are secreting him back to Tanzania to seek revenge. To pass the time on the trip, they begin telling stories, each trying to one-up the others.  This takes us to Europe and a story about three different men, each of whom have met and fallen for a mysterious woman who then disappears on them.  Each man believes the woman has ditched him to escape a sinister “Old Jew” who is following her – described by each with the stereotypes of the time.  Spoiler alert, he ends up being the good guy.  The stories end as the sun begins to rise and the dhow is approaching shore.

The final Gothic tale is The Poet about a wealthy older man who takes a young poet under his tutelage.  In the story the older man decides to marry a poor young widow who resides in one of the homes he owns.  Unbeknownst to him or the young woman, the young poet is in love with her.  Because of this, he decides he must leave Denmark after the wedding. He visits the young woman on her wedding’s eve to tell her his intention.  The old man, who had been hunting nearby, overhears the conversation, and ends up dead.

Recommendation:  For Lit majors only, with the exception of The Supper at Elsinore.