Enjoyable Mann

Friend WS (not william shakespeare) asks which are the most "enjoyable" of Thomas Mann's stories - which raises the question of what exactly constitutes and "enjoyable" story. I enjoy reading anything with beautiful and elegant writing (Proust), with insight into life and personality and society (James, Forster), with innovation and verve (Hemingway, Faulkner, Munro), with concision and precision (Carver, Chekhov, Trevor), with humor (Allen [Woody], Perleman, Moore, Beattie), with news about our lives and other lives (Baxter, Yehoshua, Jones [E] ) - so where does Mann fit in? All of the above - well, not a lot of humor nor a great deal of innovation or concision, either. But for elegance, insight into society and the human heart, and careful construction - yes, many of the stories in the collection I've just finished. Death in Venice is easy to overlook because it is so familiar to most of us, but is there a better story about vanity, ruination, narcissism, decay, perversion - not necessarily enjoyable stuff, but you can't stop reading. Of the somewhat lesser known pieces in this collection, I'd note 3: Maria and the Magician is an absolutely haunting examination of evil - ostensibly about Hitler and Mussolini, but by extension about any charlatan or horrifying political-religious leader today. Tonio Kroger is a story that speaks to every young or aspiring artist - seems a little romantic reading it later in life, but it gave me great hope and encouragement when I read it as a young man. Finally, one I'd never read before, Tristan, is an early version of what became Mann's greatest novel (Magic Mountain) but stands up really well on its own for all that - shows better than other Mann's astounding ability to create a scene and to sketch a character with careful and surprising selection of details - and the plot is very odd and disturbing - without realizing it at first, we're actually reading a murder mystery. The oblique endings to many of these stories foreshadow the work of thousands of contemporary short-story writers and is Mann's clearest connection to the open form that Joyce perfected in his early stories (Dubliners).