“At an age when others are spendthrift daydreamers, blithely postponing the execution of great plans- he began his day early with a jet of cold water at his chest and back, and then a pair of tall wax candles in silver sticks shining over his manuscript..”
This man was ready to sacrifice on the altar of art, the strength he had garnered from his sleep. This is his story.
There was such burnished prose that I was slithering upon from the first page. I learned after finishing the book that in German this book was written in a very complex manner, using many rare words, creating paradoxical juxtapositions of terms and a literal translation of the prose into English could look like gibberish, but I am telling you the one that I read was extraordinarily translated, I felt surreal at some places!
I thought of reading this book suddenly in the morning yesterday when my country was celebrating its independence day, we unfurled the tricolor at our place and then distributed sweets, a chiffon cake along with whipped cream! Though most of it melted by the time I brought it back to my room from the place we were celebrating, still it was delicious!
So the book was picked up, out of nowhere, I was reading a chapter featuring that racecourse scene in’ Anna Karenina last night, and here this morning I met this man Gustav Aschenbach, who left his apartment in Munich, overstrained by his difficult morning hour, to walk alone, in a hope that fresh air will restore him for his evening work. There he meets a strange red-haired man, he is a foreigner and after seeing this strange man he is now so eager to travel!
Gustav Aschenbach got early fame, he is a writer, a poet of overburdened and already worn out. He lived in Munich as an honored bourgeois. To quench the thirst of his travel, He goes to Adriatic Island and then to Venice.
In Venice, ‘in a gondola perhaps’, in a hotel, he meets a boy, 14 years old, Tadzio, along with his family, and the charm of this young boy enchants him, You should know that Gustav is fifty years old.
Now.
What do you want me to write about?
No, this book was not like that.
When I started reading it I thought it would be a mystery. Death in Venice and then a search for the culprit! But no! It turned out to be an extremely different thing. This turned out to be a tale of obsession. An old man is obsessed with a young boy. But you must notice that neither this man touched this boy nor ever talked to him throughout the plot, so anything that you are thinking must be thrown away from your head at once!
The story was an extreme case study of a human passion, maybe infatuation, or idée fixe, haven’t you heard this term, something of that sort !
Was this obsession about an intellectual satisfaction of a poet or was it a sensual fantasy of an old mind? Was his observation of a young boy about beauty, about God, spiritual or purely for senses? Was this a disgraced subterfuge? A trickery played by the author Or just the vigorous curves of his emotions!
What failed this old man to do what he wanted to do?
His self-esteem, his maturity, his conscience, or his late-won simplicity?
Or was it his weakness?
This was a tale of obsession, what an obsession, this man had perhaps a bee in his bonnet, a Bee of artistic pleasure or spiritual salvation, or of moral weakness! But boy! Whatever it was, it was an extraordinary reading experience for me, I read Thomas Mann for the first time. Very Impressive! In some places the prose was so lyrical that if you read it aloud you will feel yourself in a dream on a stage and when you wake up, you will find yourself: – enervated, shaken, powerless!
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