At the end of his sixties, an unnamed narrator gives his lifelong fever a diagnosis: Aschenbach Syndrome, the incurable longing for beauty and youth that does not fade with age. Through confessional therapy sessions, digital voyeurism, intimate betrayals, foreign cities, and a return to the spectral shores of Death in Venice, desire is examined not as a scandal, but as a condition. Not as lust, but as projection. Not as love, but as the terror of disappearance. No names. Only a voice asking the question that lingers beneath every gaze: Do I want them, or do I want to be them? Haunted by the finale of Visconti's film Death in Venice, this novel does not retell a legend, it interrogates it. With cultural critique and a striking emotional nakedness, it dismantles inherited narratives that have long governed beauty, aging, and desire. What if the tragedy was never desire itself? Aschenbach Syndrome challenges the quiet tyrannies we rarely name: youth supremacy, the tragic queer archetype, and the idea that aging equals disappearance. It refuses consolation, insisting instead on confrontation. Lyrical, provocative, and philosophically charged, this avant-garde meditation explores aging, shame, faith, erotic imagination, and the fragile line between witnessing beauty and trying to possess it.

Autorentext
Lucian S. is a Swiss author of Syrian descent whose writing explores the edges of identity, desire, and belonging. The President: A Queer Utopia marked his debut as a novelist, following his first book, Stripped: A Memoir.

Klappentext

Kurz und kurzweilig sinniert eine Wissenschaftlerin und Hochschullehrerin über Alltägliches und Kurioses im Internet. 38 Kolumnen aus fünf Jahren spiegeln, wie die neuen Medien uns alle berühren und unsere Lern-, Wissens- und Arbeitswelt in Bewegung bringen. Titel wie Simplify your Life Long Learning, Frühjahrsputz im Werkzeugkoffer der Wissensprofis oder Second Life ist ein Leben zuviel zeigen, dass sich alle Bewohner der modernen Lern- und Wissenswelten angesprochen fühlen dürfen. Ihre Randgedanken schreibt die Autorin unplugged von den Formalitäten wissenschaftlicher Publikationen; das macht die Lektüre der Kolumnen informativ, unterhaltsam und nicht zuletzt inspirierend.