Klappentext

Before Buddenbrooks. Before Death in Venice. Before the Nobel Prize - six early stories, written between 1896 and 1898, in which a twenty-something Thomas Mann discovered, one narrative at a time, the themes that would occupy him for the rest of his career.

In Little Herr Friedemann, a man disabled since infancy has built an entire philosophy around careful renunciation - until a woman he cannot resist arrives and dismantles it completely. In Death, a dying man's diary renders, from the inside, the strange clarity of a consciousness that knows its own end is near. In The Will to Happiness, a sickly artist gambles his life on the conviction that happiness itself might be strong enough to defeat physical decline.

In Disillusionment, a stranger on a Venice terrace delivers a devastating meditation on the gap between what literature promises and what life actually provides. In The Clown, a cultivated dilettante confesses, at last, the hollowness of a life spent appreciating art and love without ever fully committing to either. And in Tobias Mindernickel, a lonely, mocked man finds unexpected joy in a dog he adopts - joy that reveals, when threatened, something genuinely unsettling about loneliness and the need to control one's own suffering.

Six stories. One extraordinary young talent, already fully formed. The beginning of one of the twentieth century's greatest literary careers.

By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929.