It took me a long time to get to Mann, but I feel in good company with him. Lots influence of Poe and Conrad and clearly in company with Dineson, who he obviously influenced, an operatic tone, ironic, comic, erudite, and seemingly a strange mix of a 19th century feel with more modern concerns and anxieties. Paul Bowles and Bruno Shultz, who are two of my favorite writers, also claim Mann as an influence, and I can see parallels in their work. “Death in Venice” is a masterpiece of symbolism and foreshadowing with a sense of growing apocalyptic dread, strange events, odd characters (the old man pretending to be young, the weird smelling clown), a mysterious epidemic, a Dionysian dream/vision, and the obsessive quest of narcissism/pedophilia. It brings to mind Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, Machen’s “The Great God Pan”, and “Lolita; and of course a wealth of mythic allusion. “Mario and the Magician” is an eerie parable of fascism with a sinister mesmerist that reminds of character from Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables. Hawthorne troublesome parables/allegories is good touchtone for this story. “Disorder and the early sorrow” is satire of the changing social order set during the Weimar republic, examining the poverty and changing/blurring social classes. Told through the viewpoint of the history Dr. Cornelius who refuses to see his era as part of history as it lacks dignity. This is a plenty telling metaphor. The Wagner meets Poe in “The Blood of the Walsungs” a tale with elements of the gothic and decadent, and filled with opera, incest, and misanthropy. So if you like Gogol, Hawthorne, Poe, Dineson, Dante, Greek myths and drama, Conrad, Voltaire, Bowles and Shultz; then you should like Mann. And consider these lines from the opening paragraph in “Mario and the Magician”; “Luckily for them, they did not know where the comedy left off and the tragedy began; and we let them remain in their happy belief that the whole thing had been a play up till the end.”