(It certainly did more than Henry James' interminable "Wings of the Dove," which is also set there and bears some thematic similarities to Mann's story.) Today you'll pay upward of 400 euros a night to stay at the Hotel des Bains, on the Lido beachfront, where middle-aged Prussian novelist Gustav von Aschenbach pursues his ill-fated passion for a teenage Polish boy. And when you consider that the authors of each of those stories also wrote much longer works that hardly anyone ever reads, you can't help thinking there's a lesson there for would-be authors of Great Books.ĭespite its portrayal of the glorious Adriatic port city as a cesspool of disease, duplicity and decadence - well, actually, because of that portrayal - Thomas Mann's mini-masterpiece (and Luchino Visconti's overripe 1971 film version) helped lure the aesthetes of the Western world back to Venice more effectively than any tourist-board brochure.
One thinks also of "Heart of Darkness," "Notes From Underground," "The Turn of the Screw," "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Bear," among others. "Death in Venice" belongs to that group of short novels (or novellas, or long short stories) whose cultural importance is out of all proportion to their length.
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