Description

With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful.

Ageing writer Gustav von Aschenbach is on holiday in Venice when he first notices a fellow guest in the foyer of his hotel: an exceptionally beautiful boy who is staying there with his family. Admiration gives way to obsession as his days begin to revolve around seeing the boy. Meanwhile, ominous signs point to a disease spreading through the magnificent, but decaying, city and, blinded by his fixation, Aschenbach fails to notice.

Death in Venice is the finale of this seven-story collection, marked by masterful storytelling and profound, often haunting, insight.

(Cover may vary)

Publisher Review

"The real theme is fading creativity and the search for inspiration...A deep and highly complex drama of the psyche" * Financial Times * "This complex fin-de-siecle masterpiece...seems eerily to pre-echo the destructive decadence that would shortly shatter European civilisation itself" * The Times * "Thomas Mann's story of obsession and spiritual malaise" * Observer * "What Mann understands and laughs at, though it grips him, is the quasi-sexual attraction of beauty and philosophy...Death in Venice is one of the undisputed classics of contemporary European literature" * Independent * "Mann's obsessive story explores the complex, haunted relationship between an ageing writer and a beautiful Polish boy" * Express *