#Tonio Kroger

[queerographies]

[Tonio Kroger][Thomas Mann]

"Tonio Kroger" di Thomas Mann affronta il tema del dolore nell'adolescenza, evidenziando il contrasto tra sensibilità artistica e normalità. Quest'opera scritta nel 1903 continua a essere attuale, esplorando il conflitto interiore del protagonista, Tonio,

Il male di vivere di un adolescente, un classico senza tempo. Titolo: Tonio KrogerScritto da: Thomas MannTitolo originale: Tonio KrögerEdito da: SantelliAnno: 2024Pagine: 78ISBN: 9788892921344 La trama di Tonio Kroger di Thomas Mann Scritto nel 1903, questo racconto lungo si rivela oggi in tutta la sua drammatica attualità. In esso l’autore affronta il difficile rapporto tra un adolescente…

[nisreensartworld]

I talked about German literature this time. Please check it out from the blog! The full script is also on the blog post.

[mariacallous]

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (also rec’d by John Irving)

“This may not just be my favorite Dickens novel, but my favorite novel period. I read it regularly, and every time is an undimmed pleasure. More, every time it feels fresh. That is the mark of greatness. Although the comic characterization is as juicy as ever, and it’s impossible to read without laughing out loud, Dickens here gives the fullest expression—through the hero who tellingly bears, if back to front, his initials—of horror at the heartbreak, savagery and injustice of the world. It is the ultimate bildungsroman and the truest story of how a person comes to be. Not for nothing was it Freud’s favorite novel.” -NL

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

“This is a nuanced and powerful novel about growing up, the mother-daughter relationship, female identity, sexuality, cultural dissonance, privilege, poverty and the pernicious legacy of colonialism. Kincaid’s style is both immediate and headily intense. A glinting, multifaceted work within relatively so few pages.” -NL

Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

“This book was my late sister Thomasina’s favorite as a child, though it is close to my heart for other than sentimental reasons, too. Within its prettily illustrated story about a fussy eater, it is understanding and touching about the fears and joys of food, and of childhood. So enduringly touching.” -NL

Persuasion by Jane Austen

“Sparer, more savage and so much more poignant than ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ (a great book, too, and I don’t mean to disparage it at all,) ‘Persuasion’ is a novel that tells us, as only Jane Austen can, about the vanities and follies of being human with such memorably dry wit.” -NL

Middlemarch by George Eliot (also rec’d by Bret Easton Ellis, Carrie Fisher & Zadie Smith

“Despite its grand place in the literary canon, ‘Middlemarch’ is really a rich, gossipy boxed set of a novel. I first read this as a teenager in short bursts nightly with a torch after lights-out, and it gripped me like a soap opera. The foolishness of the human condition, the urgency of its whims and fancies, and the often blinding need to find meaning are unsparingly chronicled in this feast of a book.” -NL

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

“PG Wodehouse is not a writer for those who want to read about the rah-rah world of aristocratic fops, he’s a writer for those who love reading sentences that shimmer with brilliance and wit. He is the preeminent English stylist, and I find it impossible to read him without purring with pleasure and hooting with laughter. This particular Jeeves and Wooster novel is a real corker.” -NL

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

“Haunting and transcendentally compelling, this is a prose-poem of a novel about grief, loss, suffering and family. But saying what a Marilynne Robinson novel is ‘about’ seems such a brutish vulgarity: it’s the melancholic yet ecstatic beauty of her language that makes her writing just seep into me, and stay with me.” -NL

The Most of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron

“Reading a book is like making a friendship, and Nora Ephron is the funniest, cleverest, wisest (and cleverness and wisdom are not the same things at all, and rarely coexist) friend you could have. I really didn’t know whether to proffer Heartburn here or this volume, and in the end I went for this anthology, as it’s impossible to read it (and it does have excerpts from Heartburn,) without having to go on to read everything else Ephron wrote.” -NL

‘Tonio Kroger,’ included in Death In Venice, And Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann

“I know that the novella ‘Tonio Kroger’ is not Thomas Mann’s greatest work. There is some part of me that feels that I should be putting up ‘Buddenbrooks’ or ‘The Magic Mountain’ here. And there’s a strong case for ‘Death in Venice,’ too. But this is the book of his that felled me completely when I read it as a German student in my teens. All Mann’s enduring themes are here: the struggle between duty and love, between the febrile pleasure and teutonic responsibility; and the lethal vulnerability of the lover, set against the wanton cruel power of the beloved. It’s an anguished worldview, which is what spoke so directly to the adolescent reader I was, but no one reads Thomas Mann for woo-woo life-enhancing sentimentality.” -NL

Blood, Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

“It would be a mistake to think that this memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton, chef proprietor of Prune, is solely for those interested in food. It is one of the most searingly honest autobiographies I have read: it is the story of a woman struggling to find her place in the world, the story of a lost childhood and a recovered self. This is no self-pitying misery memoir: it’s full of grit and passion, combining vigor with sensitivity, and I am as hungry for her words as I am for her food.” -NL

[homouscheesecake]

"I admire those proud, cold beings who adventure upon the paths of great and dmonic beauty and despise 'mankind'; but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my bourgeois love of the human, the living and usual. It is the source of all warmth, goodness, and humour; I even almost think it is itself that love of which it stands written that one may speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet having it not is as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

Tonio Kroger

[fuoridalcloro]

“Seguì la via che doveva seguire, con passo un po' pigro e ineguale, fischiettando e guardando lontano innanzi a sé col capo reclinato da un lato; e se gli accadeva di sbagliar strada, ciò era perché per alcuni uomini non esiste una strada giusta. A chi gli chiedeva che cosa intendesse fare nel mondo, dava risposte contraddittorie, perché, come soleva dire (ed anche questo l'aveva già annotato), egli portava in sé possibilità per mille modi di esistenza, insieme alla segreta consapevolezza che, in fondo, si trattava di altrettante impossibilità”.

Thomas Mann - Tonio Kröger

[inscriptio-duenos]

romanticise your own existence.

[la-ragazza-che-ride]

Perché certi si smarriscono necessariamente, per loro non c'è una retta via.

Tonio Kröger; Thomas Mann

[uno-sguardo-poi-la-fine]

Se si diventa patetici, se si diventa sentimentali, sorge sotto le mani un che di pesante, tragicomico, superbo, grave, insipido, noioso, trito, e la fine non è altro che indifferenza nella gente, nient'altro che delusione e affanno in se stessi.

Tonio Kroger, Thomas Mann

[overig]

“He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer”

- Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger (1903).

[amaefaiciochevuoi]

Ma cosa c'era stato in tutto quel tempo in cui era diventato quello che era? - Torpore; desolazione; ghiaccio; e spirito! E arte! ... Si spogliò, si coricò, spense la luce. Sussurrò due nomi nel cuscino, quelle poche sillabe nordiche e caste che rappresentavano il modo suo più vero, e suo da sempre, di amare, di soffrire e di essere felice, che rappresentavano la vita, il sentimento semplice e profondo, il paese natale. Guardò indietro, negli anni che erano trascorsi fino a quel giorno, Pensò alle desolate avventure dei sensi, dei nervi e del pensiero attraverso cui era passato, si vide dilaniato da spirito e ironia, isterilito e paralizzato dalla conoscenza, consunto dalle febbri e dai brividi della creazione, travolto, senza mai trovare appoggio, e tra tormenti di coscienza, da contrasti estremi, tra castità e ardore, raffinato, impoverito, sfinito da esaltazioni fredde e artificiosamente ricercate, smarrito, devastato, martoriato, malato - e singhiozzò di rimpianto e di nostalgia. Intorno a lui tutto era buio e silenzioso. Ma da sotto saliva fino a lui, smorzato e ondeggiante, il ritmo in tre tempi dolce e triviale della vita.

T. Mann,  Tonio Kröger (1903).

[mariacallous]

I know that the novella Tonio Kroger is not Thomas Mann’s greatest work. There is some part of me that feels that I should be putting up Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain here. And there’s a strong case for Death in Venice, too. But this is the book of his that felled me completely when I read it as a German student in my teens. All Mann’s enduring themes are here: the struggle between duty and love, between the febrile pleasure and Teutonic responsibility, and the lethal vulnerability of the lover set against the wanton cruel power of the beloved. It’s an anguished worldview, which is what spoke so directly to the adolescent reader I was, but no one reads Thomas Mann for woo-woo life-enhancing sentimentality.

Nigella Lawson about  Tonio Kroger (included in Death in Venice, and Seven Other Stories) by Thomas Mann

[sukasukasukasuska]

Czyżby nieczyste sumienie miało być niczym innym jak tylko jątrzącą się próżnością?

- Tomasz Mann, "Tonio Kroger"

[trajektoria]

I’m sorry Thomas Mann, I really tried to enjoy your books, but I couldn’t finish The Magic Mountain, I gave up after 15 pages of Buddenbrooks and Tonio Krọ̈ger is a giant snorefest.

[la-ragazza-che-ride]

La letteratura non è un mestiere, è una maledizione - tanto perché lei lo sappia.

Tonio Kröger; Thomas Mann

[uno-sguardo-poi-la-fine]

Hans Hansen, in fondo, gliene voleva un po' di bene quando erano soli, lo sapeva. Ma non appena era presente un terzo, ecco che si vergognava di lui, sacrificandolo. E lui era di nuovo solo.

Tonio Kroger, Thomas Mann

[overig]

“... of the purifying and healing influence of letters, the subduing of the passions by knowledge and eloquence; literature as the guide to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming power of the word, literary art as the noblest manifestation of the human mind, the poet as the most highly developed of human beings, the poet as saint.”

Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger (1903)