Thomas Mann’s writing is what holds this way above the film, and in this edition you get a whole lot more than just the one perfect and very special novella.
Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful ageing writer, travels to Venice for a holiday. One day, at dinner in his hotel, Aschenbach notices an exceptionally beautiful young boy. Soon his days begin to revolve around seeing this boy and he is too distracted to pay attention to the ominous rumours that have begun to circulate about disease spreading through the city. Also contains six additional stories.
Italian director Luchino Visconti also wrote the screenplay for his 1971 adaptation of Mann's novella and travelled all over the world in search of a suitable actor for the role of Tadzio. Dirk Bogarde considered retiring after playing the part of Aschenbach, believing he could never hope to give a better performance in a better film.
‘This complex fin-de-siècle masterpiece…seems eerily to pre-echo the destructive decadence that would shortly shatter European civilisation itself’ - The Times
Author
About Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards he left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University of Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he recieved in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.
