Death in Venice

I have been around and around on the subject of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, both the story and the Luchino Visconti film made from it. After several readings and viewings, including watching the 1971 film again this week, it seems that Visconti has taken what is essentially a tale about an old pervert and inflated it with a debate about the nature of beauty. In the film, Aschenbach argues that beauty in art can only be produced by suppressing the natural world and its base instincts. True beauty comes from an elevation of the spirit and mind. But in Venice he is confronted with a human specimen that refutes all this high-sounding theorizing. The contradictions are painful psychically, matching the physical pain of the cholera that ultimately kills him. Visconti's slow, watchful eye is among the film's strongest features. He sets up a scene and then executes long panning shots that offer the viewer a wealth of details. He also uses the zoom to dramatic effect. Art like this requires not only the spirit and the mind, but hard work.

The Tartar Steppe

I am not embarrassed to say that I burst into tears on reading the last sentence of Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe. It is a book of such exquisite melancholy, so well drawn, that the end comes as both a thunderbolt and a relief. It is the story of a young military officer posted to a remote fort on the northern border, facing a vast desert. He and his colleagues await the enemy, and wait, and wait, hoping for glory or at least meaning in their lives. The themes of isolation and hopelessness are explored elegantly, coolly, and without a whiff of sentimentality. There is not a single false note in the book. A paragraph, nearly chosen at random, will suffice to give an idea:

"One after another the pages turned -- the grey pages of the days, the black pages of the nights, and both Drogo and Ortiz (and perhaps some of the other senior officers) felt a growing anxiety that they might no longer have enough time left. Insensible to the wasting power of the years the Northerners made no move, as if they were immortal and it meant nothing to them if they gambled away whole seasons. But the Fort contained poor mortal men, with no defense against the work of time and their final term was upon them. Points in time which had once seemed unreal, so distant were they, now suddenly appeared on the nearby horizon and brought to mind how ruthlessly time strikes its balances. Each time, if one were to go on, one had to work out a new system, find new terms of reference, console oneself with the thought of others still worse off."

The Tartar Steppe is called a modern classic. It is a book that could be read profitably every few years for life.

Chapter the Last

I have tried twice, and failed, to finish Faulkner's A Fable. Is that his fault or mine? Whichever, the book shows what can happen to a writer as he ages, collects laurels, and loses his youthful dynamism. Knut Hamsun gives another example with Chapter the Last, a novel which has been an agonizing read for me. Having sprinted through, and loved, his early novel Hunger, I found this one, the work of a man in his 60s, disappointing and flabby. There are some excellent passages that give hints of the writer he was, but they are long in coming.

The whole thing reads like a cross between Magic Mountain and Ten Little Indians: A group of people at a mountaintop sanitorium start dying or disappearing. In fact I wonder if Thomas Mann read this before or during the composition of his classic. Each character in Chapter the Last (the name a character gives to death) represents a part of the human spectrum of behavior, and as such never takes off as a fully formed being.

The translations of Hamsun that Knopf published in the 1920s have never been reissued and are the only way for an English reader to read the more obscure works. That makes them relatively expensive. I will be reselling this one and using the proceeds to try another, perhaps Benoni.