Visconti never uses one adjectives when four will do, does he? He's concerned with the minutiae of description, to an extent that I didn't remember. The story is basically about his increasing attraction, in factuation, with Taggio. Alongside this growing obsession, there's this growing rumour of a sickness pervading Venice. Jesus has come in, yes, and the hospitality industry is panicking so they lie about it. And Ashenbach is beginning to feel a little himself. But then he eventually finds out the truth that this disease is spreading. And the most physically threatening thing he really does is he doesn't want Taggio's family
Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s most famous – and infamous - novella.
Published in 1912, it’s about the fall of the repressed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, when his supposedly objective appreciation of a young boy’s beauty becomes sexual obsession.
It explores the link between creativity and self-destruction, and by the end Aschenbach’s humiliation is complete, dying on a deckchair in the act of ogling. Aschenbach's stalking of the boy and dreaming of pederasty can appal modern readers, even more than Mann expected.
With
Karolina Watroba, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford
Erica Wickerson, a Former Research Fellow at St Johns College, University of Cambridge
Sean Williams, Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield
Sean Williams' series of Radio 3's The Essay, Death in Trieste, can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lzd4