‘New Selected Stories’ by Thomas Mann    (2023)  –   242 pages         Translated from the German by Damon Searls

In his introduction, translator Damon Searls attempts to convince us to want to read Thomas Mann.

“He is often thought to be cold, forbidding, humorless, a kind of impenetrable high-culture obelisk… I hope the new translations in this book show that he was in fact as warm, hilarious, and heartbreaking a storyteller as anyone; his wonderful humor in particular is far more than the supercilious “irony” he is generally credited with.”

‘Buddenbrooks’ remains my favorite of the work of Thomas Mann with ‘The Magic Mountain’ a close second. I needed no special convincing to read Thomas Mann.

The placement of the first story “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow” is meant to dispel any thoughts of Thomas Mann’s “coldness” a reader might have had, and it succeeds wonderfully. It is a family story written in 1925.

It would have been helpful for me if each short story or excerpt from a longer work were printed with the year it was written along with the title.

There are only two short stories, one complete novella (‘Death in Venice’), and two excerpts from longer novels (from ‘Buddenbrooks’ and from ‘Confessions of Felix Krull’), so the title is rather a misnomer. I do believe the book serves as a good sampler of the fiction of Thomas Mann, but it would be difficult to make any claims about Thomas Mann as a short story writer based on only two stories.

I had already read the entire ‘Buddenbrooks’ and read the novella ‘Death in Venice’ at least twice, but these are new translations by Damon Searls so I suppose they merited rereading. Still I was quite surprised there were only two short stories in this selection.

‘As for the ‘Death in Venice’ translation, the special magic that Venice has for the visitor arriving by boat is conveyed more vividly and colorfully in this translation of ‘Death in Venice’ than in the two previous translations that I have read. As always, Aschenbach’s intense interest in the young boy Tadzio remains questionable. I prefer to think of it as the innocent passion of an old man.

The last excerpt, the Felix Krull excerpt, really dragged for me. This excerpt contains reminiscences from his childhood rather than a well-formed short story. He even confesses,

“I am writing down my memories first and foremost to entertain myself, and only secondarily the public.”

There surely must have been one other Thomas Mann short story with enough quality to replace it.

Grade:    B