Another 'classic' that I never read that vacation time has got me reading on the 'cheat' -- or make that 'reading' on the cheat (audible). I find Mann, frankly, repulsive -- and his style so full of pompous neuroticism that I can't really stomach him. I have a dual-lingual edition of this novella, and I should try to read it in German someday... clearly, he is formidible... but he represents a world and a set of complexes, and has a prose style (if this translation is any judge) - that is at once so modernist, so intensely neurotic, and yet stuffily bourgeois -- the very essence of pre-War (WWI) Germanic bourgois inversion -- that I can do without it.