When I ordered Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Other Stories,[1] I was quite eager to hold it in my hands. But I was slow to start reading the seven stories, written between 1897 and 1912, when the Amazon package finally arrived. Having glanced at a few paragraphs at random, I hesitated for quite some time. I was puzzled by my reluctance, though. The first two stories I read in a single day a month later. And then I waited for another month to read the third story, which I just finished. The turn-of-the-century Europe is not my place, it transpires only now. Worse, it makes me shudder. There is an image in “The Joker” (1897) that helps explain my sentiments. Mann paints a wretched beggar standing outside a jeweler’s shop and staring at some glittering gem in the window. “Such a man cannot let the desire to possess the jewel present itself clearly to his mind,” he writes, “for even the thought of such a desire would be an absurdity, an impossibility, a thought that would make him utterly ridiculous in his own eyes.”[2] “Ah,” I dropped the book at once, “such an image would be inconceivable in The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, my favorite read!” There, nothing would be an absurdity or impossibility. No thought would ever make anyone utterly ridiculous in his own eyes. By the end of the story, if not sooner, the gem would be glittering in the hands of the wretched beggar, now a mighty sultan. If stultified Europe of a century ago is not my place, neither is Mann my writer. The man and the place go too well together, I suppose. And thus it took quite some resolve on my part to finish reading “The Joker.”

Footnotes

1. Translated by David Luke, London: Vintage, 1998, first published in 1988.

2. Op. cit., p. 51.