Thomas Mann won a nobel prize in literature and is considered to be one of the 20th century's most important German-language authors. "Death in Venice" is one of his most famous works, a short novella that has received much critical acclaim and attention. These facts should be remembered before reading my forthcoming, cursory review.
I had three reactions when reading "Death in Venice", and one afterwards. The first reaction was one I always have when reading a book set in 19th or 20th century Europe: a bit of confusion about technology and customs that are somewhat similar to, but somewhat different to what I am familiar with. The second reaction, as I picked up the basic plot and setting (stern German intellectual goes on vacation in Venice, and then gets a crush on a teenage boy) was annoyance at the fact that the book's prose and plot was overwrought.
With such a smile it might be that Narcissus bent over the mirroring pool a smile profound, infatuated, lingering, as he put out his arms to the reflection of his own beauty; the lips just slightly pursed, perhaps half-realizing his own folly in trying to kiss the cold lips of his shadow--- with a mingling of coquetry and curiosity and a faint unease, both enthralled and enthralling.
And it goes on like this for a while. My third reaction, as the book draws to its close, was that I was starting to see the conceptual structure that held it together, and that the book did have a purpose that it communicated well. Then, after finishing it, my reaction was to realize that actually, it was all nonsense.
At the level of characterization, there is nothing particularly believable or interesting about the two characters in the book. One is the dour German academic and highly closeted homosexual Gustave von Aschenbach, and the other is the teenage boy Tadzio, whom he spends the novella fixated with. Although whether Tadzio counts as a character is debatable: he has no dialog, and no personality, other than to look pretty. Tadzio is an object, a piece of scenery. He makes Bella Swan look like a complicated, active, developed character. In other words, the book's characterization, such as it is, is just the internal monologue of one man.
Thematically, the book is about the dichotomy between rationality and passion. And it is this theme that is the most tiring to me, because for one thing (as the novella's references to Plato make clear), it is hardly a new idea. But beyond that, the novella's message seems to be that there are only two routes to take: you can be a staid conservative intellectual with your desires bottled up, or you can obsessively stalk a honey-curled Polish pubescent through the sickly canals of Venice until you die of cholera. No middle ground, apparently.
In other words, the book creates a single character, whose personality seems to move along one dimension, and then uses that character to hammer home a simplistic message on dichotomies, that rationality and desire are separate things, and that if you give in to desire, you will end up dying in a metaphorical and literal sewer.
And the reason that annoys me so is that this book was published in 1911, and much as I wrote with Les Enfants Terribles, while the book noodles around setting up a dichotomy between "the intellect" and "the passions" that seems so insoluble, Europe was preparing to send its population out to die in muddy holes for four years. The book serves as a tortured piece of navel gazing that was part of a Europe that was in total denial of the real weaknesses and inanity of its social structures.