If I say that this Aschenbach put me in mind of Divine in Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, I mean it as a tribute. In the Genet book, Divine, a drag queen of a certain age, is carrying on at a bar when his faux-pearl coronet breaks. The pearls scatter everywhere, and Divine’s rival queens, exquisitely attuned to the faintest hint of blood in the water, proclaim him uncrowned, the Fallen One. Divine simply takes his dentures out and plunks them onto his head, declaring, “Dammit all, ladies, I’ll be queen anyhow.”* The Aschenbach of the Heim translation shares some of Divine’s heedless
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