Thomas Mann: Tonio Kröger

This is a novella written by a German nobel laureate. It precedes his more widely known work- Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig). I found Tonio Kröger to be an almost painfully sensitive account of the youth of an artist. Though it is a translation, one can see that it is beautifully written, full of northern character, awkward moments, and philosophy about art and love. Here is one of my favorite quotes from it:

"I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer the consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me…. I don't know which makes me feel worse. The bourgeois are stupid; but you adorers of the beautiful, who call me phlegmatic and without aspirations, you ought to realize that there is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace."

I had to read this for school (Nobel Laureates: Studies in Modern World Literature), but it was not so bad. Next up is Death in Venice.