Now that it's April: Winter's Tales

I picked up Isak Dinesen's "Winter's Tales" forgetting that Dinesen was actually Baroness Karen Blixen and that originally I had wanted to read "Out of Africa", so what I thought this book was and what it ended up being were completely different things.

Her stories have a nostalgic/mythological ring to them (think: "that's so Nordic") that probably could have come off as heavy and pretentious if written poorly. Unlike other short story collections I've read, I found myself having to take a day's break or more between stories, mostly from lack of time, but also because there was such a satisfied complete feeling after each gem of a tale that it felt wrong to move on too quickly.  Sometimes you just want to savor the aftertaste. Simple writing, simple stories, so many feels -- it's rare that a book makes me tear up, but it happened. 

Personal faves: "Sorrow-Acre," "The Sailor-Boy's Tale," and "Peter and Rosa"

No quotes or dissection for this one. Best experienced with a cup of hot chocolate on a cold night.

Somnolence in Venice & Mann's Boy

Translation woes strike again!  By my estimate, Kenneth Burke's translation of  Thomas Mann's Death in Venice caused me to start this book no less than four times and fall asleep approximately every five pages (in a 96-page novella).  The heavy allegorical aspect didn't help things.  "Should we not perish and be consumed with love, as Semele once was with Zeus?"  ... Yikes.  To each their own, but this didn't do much for me.

As per the usual, I had heard of the title and author but did this as a "naive reading".  So this whole 'OMG he's a homosexual pedophile!?' plot caught me off-guard.  It's as though Lolita got passed off as an extended mythological metaphor/allegory and was published in 1924.  That being said, it's more Victorian-esque with regard to the romanticism of the child (children are innocent and the ideal of pure beauty, etc, etc) and Mann uses Tadzio (the 'youthful beauty') as a symbol rather than an actual character.  The story can be interpreted six ways to Sunday, most obviously through the constant mythological name-dropping (Apollo to Dionysus transition -- discuss!) and the blatant autobiographical elements that weirdly combine Mann's vacation with the death of composer Gustav Mahler.  See:  Just How Gay is Death in Venice?

To be frank, I didn't enjoy this book.  The emphasis on classicism and 'cold' storytelling (objective narrator) may be to blame.  I haven't gotten to a point where I'm willing to set down a book and go look up the traits of Apollo in order to understand a poorly translated and especially dry paragraph of text.  I'm okay with that.  I'm not against taking the time to do a Freudian or Nietzschian close reading, I just can't bring myself to go back and do that here.  Nor do I presume to know enough Freud/Nietzsche to attempt it.

This blog sums up my general reaction:  "Death in Venice ... through the use of complex metaphors, is essentially a rigid, damp love letter to a small half-naked boy the narrator leers at throughout."

I have two other Thomas Mann books on my canonical reading list, so we'll see how he holds up later.