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"It is the story of the voluptuousness of doom" - Thomas Mann
Death in Venice is a novella but packs a lot of heft into those few pages - musings on philosophy, desire, longing, degradation, melancholy, mortality and the intellectual artistic impulse through history. In its dealing with attraction it calls to mind the various ways this has manifested itself in human culture over time, and that people cannot help the mysterious force of attraction within. It's a great, thought-provoking book.
Gustav von Aschenbach is a successful, serious and aging German writer and widower who after suffering from writer's block decides to take a trip to Venice seeking a sort of spiritual fulfilment. In the hotel he is staying at, he happens to encounter a beautiful 14-year-old Polish boy on vacation with family named Tadzio that reminds him of a Greek sculpture and whom he takes an artistic interest in. As Aschenbach ponders philosophy and the difficulty of anyone making truly great art, his interest in Tadzio becomes obsessive and a deadly epidemic begins to spread through the old and decaying city.
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