Death in Venice (Unabridged)

Content Notice: This title may contain mature themes and adult content.

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann - (German: Der Tod in Venedig) is a novella by German author Thomas Mann, published in 1912. It presents an ennobled writer who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a boy in a family of Polish tourists-Tadzio, so nicknamed for Tadeusz. Tadzio was based on a real boy named W_adzio whom Mann had observed during his 1911 visit to the city.

Plot
The main character is Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author in his early 50s who recently has been ennobled in honor of his artistic achievement (thus acquiring the aristocratic 'von' in his name). He is a man dedicated to his art, disciplined and ascetic to the point of severity, who was widowed at a young age.

As the story opens, he is strolling outside a cemetery and sees a coarse-looking, red-haired foreigner who stares back at him belligerently. Aschenbach walks away, embarrassed but curiously stimulated. He has a vision of a primordial swamp-wilderness, fertile, exotic and full of lurking danger. Soon afterward, he resolves to take a holiday.

After a false start in traveling to Pula on the Austro-Hungarian coast (now in Croatia), Aschenbach realizes he was 'meant' to go to Venice and takes a suite in the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the island of Lido. While shipbound and en route to the island, he sees an elderly man in company with a group of high-spirited youths, who has tried hard to create the illusion of his own youth with a wig, false teeth, make-up, and foppish attire. Aschenbach turns away in disgust. Later, he has a disturbing encounter with an unlicensed gondolier-another red-haired, skull-faced foreigner-who repeats 'I can row you well' when Aschenbach orders him to return to the wharf.

Aschenbach checks into his hotel, where at dinner he sees an aristocratic Polish family at a nearby table. Among them is an adolescent boy of about 14 in a sailor suit. Aschenbach, startled, realizes that the boy is supremely beautiful, like a Greek sculpture. His elder sisters, by contrast, are so severely dressed that they look like nuns.

Later, after spying the boy and his family at a beach, Aschenbach overhears Tadzio, the boy's name, and conceives what he first interprets as an uplifting, artistic interest.