A response to Tristan

I've never been a great fan of hospitals and when asked one of my answers is that I struggle with the concept of a largely artificial community.

What I mean by that is the way that you are forced by circumstance into a situation with other people that you might avoid if you had more freedom.

In these communities of circumstance sometimes people can become confused about reality and it is exactly that scenario that Mann is writing about in Tristan.

A rather eccentric writer is holed up in a sanatorium and he falls for a woman who has been pushed to the brink by a difficult child birth.

The woman, who is described in angelic terms, finds the author amusing and interesting and through him discovers that not everything the doctors have told her she cannot do are bad for her.

As she plays the piano and Tristan and Isolde rings out in the sanitorium she finds some solace and provides the writer with the strength to tell her husband some home truths. Sadly they come too late.

Apart from reflections on the story what you are left with here are thoughts about the connections that can be made quickly and deeply between patients and the calming abilities of nature.

At moments you can picture the sanitorium as clearly as if you were flicking through a brochure on the place.

More soon...

A response to Death in Venice

Death, as the title suggests, comes in Venice. That is a fact the reader knows from the outset but what sort of death is a more interesting question.

Death of a dream, a romantic ideal, as well as death in the literal sense is being described here.

But before I get into that just a quick comment on the description. This has not been an easy story to read because it doesn't flow. There are times when you wonder if something suffers from being too literary in style. That said you grasp what is going on here but it could have come across better.

What is said concerns Gustave von Aschenbach a writer who has headed off on holiday to get a break from his writing routine in Munich.

He becomes fixated and obsessed to a degree with another guest, a young Polish boy, who he can not reallu understand or makes any great connection with over his stay. But the dream of his beauty, the romantic ideal that the young man represents takes over Aschenbach.

Takes him over so much that despite his almost priviledged position of knowing about the plague in the city he fataly drops his guard and allows his obsession to derail him.

More to come from the other couple of stories in this collection, tristan and Tonio Kroger, over the next two days...