Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

Please Come Home - Camel

Tr. Spa-Eng. from a review in Shvoong

 With a simple but wonderful novel architecture, Thomas Mann develops a convincing account of an encounter, like a swan song, with physical love (platonic way, actually) of a writer until then locked in his fields in search of intellectual beauty.
 After watching a strange man at the door of a cemetery during a walk, the writer Von Aschenbach decides to take a vacation to enter a new phase of creativity and meets himself, after another failed plan, in the city of Venice. There he feels attracted by the Polish teenager Tadzio, whose family live in the same hotel where he is staying, and spends his time watching him from afar and chasing him with discretion through the streets and canals of Venice. They never exchange a word. Only once a direct gaze of the young makes the writer mutter: "You must not smile like that! You must not smile like that to anyone!"
 He makes an attempt to escape from that passion and the city, but a lost luggage anecdote serves as an excuse to return to the same hotel. Even the increasingly insistent rumors that there is an epidemic of cholera in the city cannot make him leave. On the contrary, he allows himself to be carried away by the cult of the aesthetic to the point of being persuaded by his hairdresser to dye his hair and wear makeup. With symptoms of the disease, Aschenbach keeps watching the boy from afar, on a beach where there are almost no tourists and while the Polish family are also making preparations to leave the place. On a hammock he becomes dead, after the makeup had shed about him.