My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):
Truly amazing. The early stories seem like sketches for longer works: Little Herr Friedermann or The Joker could be novels the length of Buddenbrooks, and it is the remaining stories which I find most successful. I read Tristan and Death in Venice twice because they warrant it. Immaculate, brilliant stories, the leitmotiv structure adds such depth. In both, perhaps, art is destruction: in Spinell it is the destruction of another, and in Aschenbach it is the destruction of himself. I am hardly able to begin to describe - especially on a postcard - the profoundly moving effect of these two stories. (Is there a parallel between Death in Venice and Heart of Darkness?)
