Death in Venice & Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann

We’ll be meeting at 7:00pm on Thursday, October 9, at our usual venue: upstairs at the Shakespeare Hotel, 200 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills, Sydney.

For this session, we’ll be reading two short works by Thomas Mann: Death in Venice (1912) and Tonio Kröger (1903).

Death in Venice is a novella of around 70 pages, exploring themes of beauty, obsession, and decay. Gustav von Aschenbach is an aging writer who becomes infatuated with a young boy while vacationing in Venice, even as a cholera epidemic silently spreads through the city. Mann, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, uses the story to examine the conflict between rational restraint and irrational desire. It remains one of the most celebrated works of 20th-century German literature.

Tonio Kröger, by the same author, is about 60 pages long. In the jargon, it is not an explicitly 'gay novel' but has a 'queer subtext.' It is the story of Tonio, the son of artists, who struggles with being an outsider.

Hard copies of both stories are available from The Bookshop, 207 Oxford St, Darlinghurst NSW 2010.

A soft copy of Death In Venice can be found at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66073 Easily available from local libraries. A youtube search will bring up lots of interesting links, including professionally read copies. Easily available at local libraries.

Copies of Tonio Kröger are a little more difficult to find (but can be found at The Bookshop). A soft copy is available in a collection of German stories at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30941 at page 184.

The usual format is that we talk about the reading in a fairly focused manner for about 45 mins to an hour, and then close the meeting. Almost everyone stays back to talk more about the book or anything else!

The Shakespeare Hotel is a lively pub in Sydney’s inner east, but its semi-private rooms upstairs are ideal for thoughtful discussion. We’ll be meeting in the Two Tables Room—look for a sign or ask at the bar. Please note that access involves walking up two short flights of stairs.

The venue is just a 10-minute walk from Central Station, directly opposite the Surry Hills Light Rail stop, and local parking is generally reasonable.