For reasons that elude me, Noble Prize winner,Thomas Mann is one of those authors I've always meant to read but somehow have never gotten around to. He's often considered the greatest German novelist of the 20th century, so I opened this collection of short stories with high expectations. But what a huge let down. Each one of the short stories main character centered around a sad, pathetic, looser with an unhealthy
obsession for a women. Every single one ! Boring ! The book ended with the famous novella Death in Venice and I assumed things had to better. But no, once again, another man dealing with an unhealthy obsession. But this time it's even worse, because the obsession is a teenage boy. Perhaps some day I'll try another work by Mann which will give a better ideas as to why he is so well renowned. ( )

Thomas Mann's novels are far better than his short stories. Period. This collection spans the years of 1896 to 1912 and I found them to be of uneven quality. The one I liked best was Tonio Kröger, which was also Mann's own favorite among his works. It has a much tighter and leaner structure than its more famous counterpart Death in Venice. Though the latter is more evocative and also has more depth, the story took forever to even get started. The same goes for Gladius Dei (an alternative title for it could be 'Savonarola goes to Munich') – it's like Mann can’t help himself going overboard in descriptions of the most uninteresting kind. It must have been more entertaining for himself than for the reader, who isn't given the slightest hint about why these descriptions should carry any import until an eternity of pages later - if at all. Surprisingly, I found myself almost siding with the Münchner Savonarola, here called Hieronymus, against the disagreeable bourgeois art-dealer who is his nemesis in this story – though I don’t share his passion for the Madonna, or more to the point: in contrast to Hieronymus, I rather like her undressed. Tristan is another story built upon the Liebestod-theme, like Tonio Kröger, though here it might even amount to murder – or maybe suicide – anyway, it’s death by Wagner, no less! (Ingenius "murder weapon" by the way.)
The Joker is a story in the "superfluous man"-genre, but as only Mann could have written it - while Little Herr Friedemann is transported out of of his orderly existence by a sudden passion, somewhat reminiscent of Death in Venice but written much earlier. Finally, The Road to the Churchyard is one of the shortest of these stories, and it's as short as it is absurdly comical. Here the main character, Lobgott Piepsam, more or less self-destructs on his way to the cemetery to visit the grave of his late wife. Not exactly a comical setup, you say? But then you probably haven’t yet been introduced to Piepsam. – There is quite a lot of self-destruction in several of these stories, so this comical interlude (another was Gladius Dei) was a relief.
I read these stories while traveling back and forth to work, and a good measure of how much I like a book is whether I continue reading it at home; with this book that happened only with a couple of these stories and it has taken me several months to finish reading it. It is possible that this could be due to the translation, but I'm not particularly tempted to give them a try in German. All in all: fascinating at times, boring at others. I’m actually quite relieved to have made it all the way through this book, though I'm nevertheless glad I did.




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La muerte en Venecia es un profundo y trascendental estudio de la pureza y la belleza, disímiles, embrolladas azarosamente en virtud de las percepciones sensoriales y los engranajes incomprensibles del alma. ( )

Just you try and fall in love with youth and *not* die! Mann's character wants it so bad that it almost happens. ( )

Mann commented on the life of writers and the poor results produced by those who dabble in writing but don't pursue it as a full career. He also seems to be stating that writers must have something wrong with them to be effective, and this must be something that sets them emotionally apart from others and requires writing to restore balance to them as people. This seems to me to be a view of writing that does not really match reality for most writers. His characters in this collection of stories tend to be writers who make unexpected decisions. There are some touching moments in most of the stories. One story can be interpreted as either a debate between classical and modern values or a disturbing view into one man's initial experience with pedophiliac desire. Overall, I was disappointed. ( )