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Gianmarco Antolini gapag — Not as good as "The End of the Affair", but captivating.

Takeshi Gondo takeshigondo — This was an AMAZING book!!!! I was at wal-mart and I picked it randomly not knowing what it was, so I read it and fell in love with it, I really recommend this book! The author is also very amazing! :)

Shawn Kearney shawnkearney — Once again it's Spenser to the rescue. this time he is helping Frank the cop find his missing wife.

Camille Faucon camcamf — Elements in a Composition "Death in Venice" was published in 1912, when Thomas Mann was 37. The protagonist is in his mid-50’s. Both Mann and his wife, Katia, acknowledged that virtually all of the elements of the plot were modelled on their trip to Venice in 1911. However, I don’t see any value in trying to analyse the novella as an exploration of Mann’s own homoeroticism. Mann had to choose, prioritise, sublimate and arrange his inspiration as "elements in a composition". I’d prefer to approach the novella on the basis that it addresses abstract issues that were of concern to Mann for the whole of his life. Indeed, most of them were of equal concern to Goethe, Nietzsche and Freud, not to mention Socrates and Plato before them and Nabokov subsequently. To paraphrase Anthony Heilbut, I’d prefer to "contemplate the metaphysical implications than the sordid reality". I don’t really care if there was a sordid reality. "Overindulged Intellect, Overcultivated Erudition" Gustav von Aschenbach is a prominent writer who has achieved critical, popular and official success. He has his "father’s sober, conscientious nature" (an Apollonian influence) and the "darker, more fiery impulses of the mother" (a Dionysian influence). Though he had passed through a "libertine chrysalis stage", he "had never [truly] known leisure, the carefree idleness of youth,...he had...stumbled in public, made false moves, made a fool of himself, violating tact and good sense in word and deed. Yet he eventually gained the dignity to which…every great talent feels instinctively drawn." In the manner of his father, he had "overindulged the intellect, overcultivated erudition", combined the "rapture of the will with clever management" and so never managed to become an "incorrigible bohemian". He was married, but soon after became a widower with a daughter who is now married. He is unencumbered by any significant female presence. An experience while waiting for a tram rattles his composure. In a scene that foreshadows the primary drama of the novella, Aschenbach scrutinises a relatively nondescript male in a bast hat who looks at him "so belligerently, so directly, so blatantly determined to challenge him publicly and force him to withdraw it". This experience awakened in him a latent desire, and this desire "sported eyes". He learns to look, he learns to see, he learns, perhaps, to gaze: "His imagination…conjured forth the earth’s manifold wonders and horrors in his attempt to visualize them: he saw." While he has always been "averse to diversion and no lover of the external world and its variety", he feels an "urge to flee his work, the humdrum routine of a rigid, cold, passionate duty." Aschenbach’s flight from diligence witnesses him depart to Venice, a city which is half fairy-tale and half tourist trap. He has succumbed to a Wanderlust. The Lust of the Wanderer One purpose of the trip might be to satiate not just Aschenbach’s need to wander, but his lust as well. Not only does Aschenbach embark on a journey into the outside world, but he commences a journey into his own psyche. Again, Mann uses a "double" to foreshadow what is to come, this time by describing the atmosphere of one of Aschenbach’s novels: "Elegant self-possession concealing inner dissolution and biological decay from the eyes of the world until the eleventh hour; a sallow, sensually destitute ugliness capable of fanning its smoldering lust into a pure flame, indeed, of rising to sovereignty in the realm of beauty; pallid impotence probing the incandescent depths of the mind for the strength to cast an entire supercilious people at the foot of the Cross, at their feet; an obliging manner in the empty, punctilious service of form; the life, false and dangerous, and the swiftly enervating desires and art of the born deceiver." This language of dissolution, decay, destitution, ugliness, impotence, superciliousness, punctiliousness, deception hints at the nature of Aschenbach’s inner desire. However, I prefer the view that this pejorative language is intended to describe not the nature of his desire, but the consequences of repressing it. To the extent that we repress desire, we are inauthentic. The Journey to Elysium There is a duality in the journey. It seems to be genuinely life-affirming, but it recognises the inevitability of Aschenbach’s death (which is foreshadowed in the title of the novel). Mann describes the journey in terms of the Elysian Fields: "Then he would feel he had indeed been whisked off to the land of Elysium, to the ends of the earth, where man is granted a life of ease, where there is no snow nor yet winter, no tempest, no pouring rain, but only the cool gentle breath released by Oceanus, and the days flow past in blissful idleness, effortless, free of strife, and consecrated solely to the sun and its feasts." 1, 2 Implicit is not just the promise of a certain joie de vivre, but perhaps also a joie de mort. It’s arguable that Elysium represented both the beginning and the end of Aschenbach’s life, perhaps the realization of his life. It is a place where the quick and the dead, mortals and immortals, men and gods are one. The Middle of the Journey On the ship out, Aschenbach experiences another potential double, an ugly version of himself– an older man consorting with youths, dressed in an extravagantly cut, foppish, gaudy suit with a "rakishly uptilted Panama hat" (does the hat maketh the man?), whom he describes as a "superannuated dandy": "...it was repugnant to behold the state to which the spruced-up fossil had been reduced by his spurious coalition with the young…he displayed a pitiful exuberance, buttonholing everyone who came up to him, jabbering, winking, sniggering, lifting a wrinkled, ringed finger as a part of some fatuous teasing and licking the corners of his mouth with the tip of his tongue in a revoltingly suggestive manner." Note the almost vicious assonance – spruced-up, reduced, spurious, exuberance, fatuous, suggestive – which might owe something, if not everything, to the translation. Clearly repulsed, Aschenbach describes his feelings in terms of "warping" (bent, twisted, distorted): "He had the impression that something was not quite normal, that a dreamlike disaffection, a warping of the world into something alien was about to take hold…Aschenbach watched him with a frown, and once more a feeling of numbness came over him, as if the world were moving ever so slightly yet intractably towards a strange and grotesque warping, a feeling which circumstances kept him from indulging in..." The Weft and the Warp in the Social Fabric The reference to "indulging" seems to suggest that he might have participated, but for the circumstances that intervened. This dualism is woven into the fabric of the novel, it is its weft and warp. As Aschenbach summarises the events of his voyage, he remarks: "The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. "Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. "Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden." Solitude can breed aberrant or deviant behavior. Society is a leveler, a normaliser. "Wretched Figure" Mann hints at this duality earlier when he summarises Aschenbach’s novel "Wretched Figure", about a character who acts out of "debility, depravity, or ethical laxity". Aschenbach’s creative process reflects a moral rigor or ossification as he abandoned his youthful embrace of the existentialist "abyss". He had sided with convention, and "cast out" the non-conformist: "The power of the word by which the outcast was cast out heralded a rejection of all moral doubt, all sympathy with the abyss, a renunciation of the leniency implicit in the homily claiming that to understand is to forgive, and what was under way here, indeed, what had come to pass was the ‘miraculous rebirth of impartiality,’ which surfaced a short time later with a certain mysterious urgency in one of the author’s dialogues... "Was it an intellectual consequence of this "rebirth," this new dignity and rigor, that at approximately this time critics observed an almost excessive intensification of his aesthetic sensibility, a noble purity, simplicity, and harmony of form that henceforth gave his artistic production so manifest, indeed, so calculated a stamp of virtuosity and classicism?" The Aesthetic Form Still, Aschenbach speculates that this moral rigidity contains a paradox: "...does not moral fortitude beyond knowledge—beyond disintegrative and inhibitory erudition—entail a simplification, a moral reduction of the world and the soul and hence a concomitant intensification of the will to evil, the forbidden, the morally reprehensible? "And has not form a double face? Is it not moral and immoral at once—moral as the outcome and expression of discipline, yet immoral, even antimoral, insofar as it is by its very nature indifferent to morality, indeed, strives to bend morality beneath its proud and absolute scepter?" Something powerful has occurred in these Nietzschean words. The type of erudition that Aschenbach targets is inhibitory, repressive, inauthentic and disintegrative. It creates a false dichotomy, which ironically intensifies the lure of evil. Equally importantly, Aschenbach has severed form, beauty and aesthetics from the realm of morality. This permits the remainder of the novel to concern itself with beauty, desire and the gaze, free of moral connotations. It’s up to us, the readers, to determine whether this quest is legitimate. The Beauty of Tadzio This is when a beautiful long-haired blonde 14 year old Polish boy called Tadzio comes into the picture. As would later be the case with "Lolita", this sentence might be less disturbing for readers, if the boy’s age began with a digit other than "1". I wish to postpone my discussion of hebephilia to the aesthetic or metaphysical issues. I also want to divorce the metaphysical issues from any concern whether the relationship is homoerotic or heteroerotic. Aschenbach first spies Tadzio while seated on the promenade outside his hotel: "Aschenbach noted with astonishment that the boy was of a consummate beauty: his face—pale and charmingly reticent, ringed by honey-colored hair, with a straight nose, lovely mouth, and an expression of gravity sweet and divine—recalled Greek statuary of the noblest period, yet its purest formal perfection notwithstanding it conveyed a unique personal charm such that whoever might gaze upon it would believe he had never beheld anything so accomplished, be it in nature or in art." The response is an aesthetic one. It focuses on formal perfection as if the boy was a work of art, a classical Greek statue. To the extent that he is beautiful, he is also divine, a product or act of the gods. However, Mann goes further than pure artistic analysis: Aschenbach observes a unique personal charm, one that might not be found in either nature or art. Mann elaborates: "Good, good, thought Aschenbach with that cool, professional approval in which artists encountering a masterpiece sometimes shroud their delight, their excitement." I’m interested in his choice of the word, "shroud", which could mean either "clothe" (which is relatively neutral) or "hide". If the latter meaning was intended, then it introduces a sense of disingenuousness or insincerity. Divine Beauty Later, Aschenbach describes the statue as godlike. He associates beauty with the divine. It is how the divine manifests itself on earth. Beauty is perfection of form, and perfection is representative of the divine: "His eyes embraced the noble figure standing there at the edge of the blue, and in a rush of ecstasy he believed that his eyes gazed upon beauty itself, form as divine thought, the sole and pure perfection that dwells in the mind and whose human likeness and representation, lithe and lovely, was here displayed for veneration." Aschenbach quotes Socrates to Phaedrus: "For beauty, my dear Phaedrus, and beauty alone is at once desirable and visible: it is, mark my words, the only form of the spiritual we can receive through our senses and tolerate thereby. "Think what would become of us were the godhead of reason and virtue and truth to appear before our eyes!...Hence beauty is the path the man of feeling takes to the spiritual, though merely the path, dear young Phaedrus, a means and no more." The sight of true beauty unsettles Aschenbach, as if he had never experienced it in nature or in art before: "This was intoxication, and the aging artist welcomed it unquestioningly, indeed, avidly. His mind was in a whirl, his cultural convictions in ferment; his memory cast up ancient thoughts passed on to him in his youth though never yet animated by his own fire." Gazing at Tadzio forces Aschenbach to cast off his moral rigidity. He now resides solely within the aesthetic (and therefore, the spiritual) sphere, or so it would seem. Platonic Forms The word "form" is vital to Mann’s analysis of beauty. It reflects Plato’s theory of Forms or Ideas. It’s probably also worth mentioning Kant in this context (but that’s a whole other story). The ideal form is the path by which beauty allows us to travel to divinity or spirituality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_o... Still, Mann appears to poke fun at the idea as well: "Tired yet mentally alert, [Aschenbach] whiled away the lengthy meal pondering abstract, even transcendental matters such as the mysterious connection that must be established between the generic and the particular to produce human beauty and moving on to general problems of form and art only to conclude that his thoughts and discoveries resembled certain seemingly felicitous revelations that come to us in dreams and after sober consideration prove perfectly inane and worthless." Again, it’s difficult to determine whether this apparent aside is designed to undermine our perception of Aschenbach’s sincerity. The Subject’s Relationship with the Object of Beauty Once an object of beauty exists, we can look at and see it. We gaze at it. We desire it. "Our desire sports eyes." To reverse the order of Socrates’ dictum, beauty is both visible and desirable. The object of my desire is a vehicle through which I can experience something beautiful, feel good, and witness something divine, godly or spiritual. The German word "Sehnsucht" describes the sense of longing, yearning or craving for the object of desire, as well as the sense that something is missing or incomplete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht Aschenbach feels this Sehnsucht more acutely, because he is a writer. Again, he cites Socrates: "...we poets cannot follow the path of beauty lest Eros should join forces with us and take the lead…passion is our exultation and our longing must ever be love—such is our bliss and our shame." Our longing manifests itself as love. So it is that Aschenbach: "...whispered the standard formula of longing—impossible here, absurd, perverse, ridiculous and sacred nonetheless, yes, still venerable even here: "I love you!" Yes, Aschenbach has made a silent declaration of love, but has he made a fool of himself again? Lust in Longing The perception of beauty gives the subject an experience of the divine. This allows the subject to internalize the divine. Mann/Aschenbach uses this mechanism to describe a paradox: "And then he [Socrates] made his most astute pronouncement, the crafty wooer, namely, that the lover is more divine than the beloved, because the god dwells in the former, not the latter, which is perhaps the most delicate, most derisive thought ever thought by man and the source of all the roguery and deep-seated lust in longing." Socrates’ describes the desire for a whore or a "comely maid" as lust, whereas a man's desire for his wife is love, even though it is also part lust. Perhaps, the quotation of Socrates is directed at the dissociation of love and lust, where lust dominates, in which case it constitutes "roguery". While Aschenbach does not consummate his love or longing for Tadzio, some readers might believe that his "love" is mere rationalization of his lust. Transgressive Lust I don’t consider homoerotic love to be transgressive. The gender of the love object is personal to the subject. I am more interested in the metaphysics and the mechanisms of desire, lust and love (and their mutual fulfillment) than the gender of the object. I also don’t see any point in trying to analyse Mann’s personal views on homosexuality within a literary context. I think that he places all forms of love within the same metaphysical framework. I believe that beauty, desire, lust and love are subjective. Each of us carries around in our mind a "form", which we apply to each object upon which we gaze. To the extent that the object and the ideal conform, we find it beautiful and we feel good. Social standards and ideals of beauty might impact on us, but that does not detract from the subjectivism of our own preferences. You Can Look, But You Can’t Touch Readers might wish to form a view with respect to Aschenbach’s hebephilia. This is a moral and legal issue determined and enforced by social sanction. Mann suggests that Aschenbach lost his moral compass: "...when he sat in the morning by the sea, his gaze—heavy, injudicious, and fixed—resting on the object of his desire, or when, as evening fell, he resumed his undignified pursuit through the narrow streets clandestinely haunted by loathsome dying, things monstrous seemed auspicious and the moral code null and void." However, apart from thinking and stalking, Aschenbach never actually did anything either immoral or illegal. He never consummated his passion for the object of his desire. He might have had a cosmetic makeover, he might have been "in search of his lost youth", but he did not transgress with any other lost youth. I think he was genuinely "in love". Sun, Leisure and Sea Breezes Aschenbach’s journey took him to the edge of the Elysian Fields, the edge of the sea, Oceanus, a beach where "the sun diverts our attention from the intellectual to the sensual". Tadzio was the metaphorical vessel by which he arrived there. As we can glean from the title, Aschenbach also died there. As Aschenbach dies in his chair, Mann plays around with the identity of the perspective he is describing. At first, it is Aschenbach’s, then it appears to be Tadzio’s, then it reverts to Aschenbach. Each one gazes at the other. I suspect that Mann’s intention was to transmit Aschenbach’s aesthetics to Tadzio, if he did not already subconsciously share them. If we remove the hebephilic issue by substituting a consenting adult object, then the novella is an eloquent argument not to repress desire, except within moral and legal limits. It is the "overindulged intellect", "overcultivated erudition" that is disintegrative and inhibitory, and therefore unhealthy. Mann was trying to integrate the Apollonian and the Dionysian spirits. I still think it’s a good idea.