![]() I was aware of Aschenbach’s obsession with a 14-year-old Polish boy named Tadzio, whom he sees (though does not meet) on vacation in Venice. I admittedly should have known Death in Venice concludes with an epidemic that leads to protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach’s eponymous fate, given the conditions of social restrictions under which I began Michael Heim’s 2004 translation of the 1912 work. For all the technological progress made over the past century, humans have changed little in their approach to a health crisis. ![]() Taking on a story about a deadly disease may not appeal to everyone in the midst of a deadly outbreak, but it was an eerily compelling experience to consume a work containing passages that sound like they could’ve been written a few weeks ago, knowing Mann completed the novella more than 100 years ago. ![]() Surely a particular event in a particular time and place cannot have happened more than once, according to our current understanding of physics, but the experience of reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice during the coronavirus pandemic brings on a sustained sense of déjà vu that is difficult to ignore.
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