Like I said (yesterday), I read Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912) as a teenager. But what does a late-1970s teenager know about life that might allow them to appreciate this story of yearning and regret? Thankfully I can remember how I felt about books I'd read as a teenager that are known not for what I remember of them but as stories of yearning and regret. Imagine how I felt as an adult in the late-1990s when an editor told me, "Your writing reminds me of Gide." Next to Herman Hesse and Erma Bombeck, I read more Andre Gide in my teenage years than any other writer.
There's too much writing in Thomas Mann's writing. Three times now I've tried to read his greatest book The Magic Mountain (1924), at three different points in my life, and it got harder each time -- because of the volume of writing. I'm getting that too-much-writing feeling again with Death in Venice, a feeling I never had when I first read it because I bathed in the writing. Yes, this is something that happens to writers when they are younger and drawn not to story but to the mechanics of writing. My teenage reading experiences are rooted not in the stories I read but in the experience of the language, as writing.
Below is Mann's von Aschenbach, closer to my age now than I was when I first read (of) him:
"True, what he felt was no more than a longing to travel: yet coming upon him with such suddenness and passion as to resemble a seizure, almost a hallucination. Desire projected itself visually: his fancy, not quite yet lulled since morning, imaged the marvels and terrors of the manifold earth. He saw. He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank -- a kind of primeval wilderness of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels ..." (9)
No comments:
Post a Comment