Recommendations
Books Like Death in Venice
Best books to read after Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Readers who love Death in Venice by Thomas Mann are drawn to its combination of the perfect novella form, the extraordinary density of its symbolic apparatus (Nietzsche's Apollonian/Dionysian, Plato's theory of beauty, classical mythology), and the catastrophic passion that destroys a man of the highest discipline. They want works that deal with the Apollonian/Dionysian opposition, the aesthete's relationship to beauty, the German literary tradition, and the short masterpiece that says more in a hundred pages than most novels say in five hundred.
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Tonio Kröger
by Thomas Mann
The companion novella — Tonio's love of the bourgeois world he has lost. The companion investigation of the same theme: the artist's relationship to the beautiful person who embodies the life he has renounced; but where Tonio's conclusion is loving, Aschenbach's is catastrophic
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The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
The companion novel — Hans Castorp at the sanatorium. The companion investigation of the same theme: the individual educated out of his discipline by an encounter with the extraordinary, and the education's ambiguous relationship to death
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Doctor Faustus
by Thomas Mann
The companion late novel — Adrian Leverkühn's pact with the Devil. The companion investigation of the same theme: the artist who renounces ordinary human warmth for creative power, and the catastrophic consequences of that renunciation
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's companion investigation of the catastrophic passion for an unattainable, inappropriate beloved. Both are organized around a man of high cultivation who is destroyed by a passion he cannot control and whose narrative is the attempt to make art out of the destruction
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The Birth of Tragedy
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche's companion investigation of the Apollonian and Dionysian in Greek art. The companion philosophical text: Mann uses Nietzsche's opposition to structure Death in Venice — Aschenbach's entire career has been Apollonian, and the passion for Tadzio is the Dionysian irruption that his life has suppressed
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A Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Huysmans's companion novel about the aesthete Des Esseintes — the man who has retreated from life into art and artifice. The companion investigation of the same theme: the extraordinarily sensitive man destroyed by the contact with the real world he has avoided
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Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Mann's companion novel — the decline of the Buddenbrook family. The same German bourgeois world seen from the perspective of the family: the artistic hypersensitivity that destroys the Buddenbrooks is the same force that, in Aschenbach, becomes the catastrophic passion
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The Symposium
by Plato
Plato's companion dialogue on love and beauty. The companion philosophical text: Mann uses Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium to give the passion for Tadzio its philosophical dimension — Aschenbach quotes Socrates to himself as he watches Tadzio, and the irony is central to the novella
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