Death in Venice – Thomas Mann

I have a list of books that I intend to write something about. Just because I can’t decide where to start, each of these books is given a number, and then I pick which one I should write about next by using a random number generator (or ask my wife for a random number). Curiously enough, I now have to write about back-to-back Mann(s).

This book was recommended to us by our high-school teacher as a summer read. Her expectations were a bit too high – I’m quite positive I ended up being the only kid in the class to actually read the book, and surely the only one not to simply think of Gustav as a “perverted faggot” (in my classmates’ defence, it will probably take millennia to undo what good old Catholic morals have done to little Italian towns).

I was 15, and at the start I struggled mightily with Mann’s style. I re-started the book so many times that I had come to know the first page of the book by heart. But then I got started, and fell in love. In my mind, Tadzio had the exact traits of the young actor who played him in the Visconti movie. And this is one of the few books that I would consider re-reading (there are just too many great books to read, and I have the feeling that I simply won’t have time to re-read any, save a few exceptions).

I’m one of those people who think that Venice is the most fascinating and magical place in the world. Until I read the book, however, I never liked its Lido. I still don’t, but now I’ve gone there a bunch of times just because of the book.

Mephisto – Klaus Mann

For years, I thought that Mephisto was just a critically acclaimed movie (which I owned and never watched, clearly) – then a friend gave me this as a birthday present, because it was his father’s favourite book, and the rise of Nazism and all that. In one go I found out that the movie was taken from a book, and that Thomas Mann had a son who could also write, although not as well as him.

The book is a great and fairly quick read. It is fascinating, in particular when one thinks that it was published in 1936, at a time in which the rest of Europe hadn’t yet understood the full depravity of the Nazi regime. It’s a metaphor of the entire German society in the 20’s and 30’s, but I’m not excessively fond of ground-sweeping generalizations, so I prefer to read this book as a demonstration of the fickleness of over-ambitious people, ready to compromise on all their principles (which, probably, they often don’t have in the first place).