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Title: Buddenbrooks : The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann ISBN: 0-679-75260-9 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 28 June, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 (27 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Decline of family, incline of writing talent
Comment: Buddenbrooks tells the story of three generations of a proud family in the mid to late 19th century. Sadly, the family heritage begins to sink into a quagmire of bad business decisions, bad marital decisions, apathy and just plain bad luck.
What really sets this opus (and other Mann novels) apart from "standard fare" works of literature is the depth and richness of personalities which are found in its characters. There are no "stock characters" to be found in Mann. By the end of the novel, I felt as though I personally knew the Buddenbrooks and as such was compelled to feel sad about their fate. I can think of no higher compliment that I could possibly grant a novel.
The story tells of a family which thought it would continue to prosper forever. The stark reality soon sets in that the family will have to struggle in order to retain any sort of Buddenbrook dignity at all. It seems that entropy increases with each successive generation, and seemingly nothing can reverse the trend...
So, read this book. Join the Buddenbrooks thru decades of weddings, funerals, musical performances, travels to the beach and deep existential philosophical inquiries. A wonderful glimpse of changing social structures and traditions in mid to late 19th century Germany. life.
Rating: 5
Summary: Death in a High Place
Comment: LIKE Goethe, to whom he devoted a novel ("The Beloved Returns") and several thoughtful essays, Thomas Mann published his first and most enduringly popular novel at the age of 25. Unlike "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774), Goethe's brief epistolary account of the frustrations of life and love leading to the troubled hero's suicide, Mann's "Buddenbrooks" chronicles four generations in the history of a prosperous North German bourgeois family.
The saga picks up the tale of the Buddenbrooks in 1835 at the peak of their financial prosperity and family stability. Old Johann Buddenbrook, son of the founder of the family firm, has just moved the family and the business into one of the most handsome houses in town. By the time the novel ends 42 years later, the aging yet still spirited Tony is almost the only surviving member of the family. Her parents and grandparents, as well as Thomas and a younger sister, have died. Christian is confined to an asylum, and the only male heir is dead. The house has been sold and the firm liquidated. In the course of hundreds of pages we have witnessed a succession of marriages, births, divorces and deaths punctuating the decline of the initially robust family -- a decline brought about by the weakening of business acumen and ethics as the family succumbs to the enticements of wealth, with its inevitable concomitants of sickly religiosity, artistic inclinations and disease.
"Buddenbrooks" constitutes a remarkable achievement for a first novel. Incisive characterizations are achieved through a witty use of German dialects and the adaptation of leitmotif techniques borrowed from Wagner. And the fast-paced narrative is tightly controlled by a structure evident in the parallel between the first chapter and the last: both take place on rainy evenings in the fall, and both feature Tony Buddenbrook in conversations about religion -- first with her rationally skeptical grandfather and at the end with her aged teacher, who has always waged the good fight "against the onslaughts of reason." "Buddenbrooks" encounters a work that is close in style, vocabulary, idiom and tone to the writer's intent and can thus appreciate more fully the monumental achievement of the artist as a young Mann, this is a powerful read!
Rating: 5
Summary: A Surprisingly Resonant Portrayal of a Lost Era
Comment: In his 1762 treatise "The Social Contract," Rousseau wrote: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Mann's magnum opus, pregnant with bleak symbolism and teeming with lives lived in quiet desperation, highlights this stark fact.
"Buddenbrooks" is the story of a merchant family and their wholesale grain-trading business. It covers the rise of the Buddenbrook firm from the days of the German confederation, to its eventual dissolution during the early years of the Deutsches Reich. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the Buddenbrook firm is an unyielding prison from which escape is nearly impossible. Despite their wealth and status in the community, the Buddenbrooks were not truly free to pursue their own happiness. In the name of business prestige and family honor, Antonie Buddenbrook, daughter of patriarch Jean Buddenbrook, forgoes the love of her life to marry a cunning businessman who marries her for her dowry, which he uses to prop up his failing business. Thomas, the heir to the Buddenbrook empire, witnessing his sister's sacrifice, breaks off his youthful affair with a common girl and decides to focus his energies on learning the ropes of the world of business. Christian, Thomas's brother, was early on marked to be a scholar due to his wit; however, the untimely death of Jean Buddenbrook compels him to take up a position in the firm. In due course, events and personal circumstances unmask Christian's dissipation and mental incapacity for the practical pursuits of commerce. Gotthold, the 'prodigal son' and stepbrother of Jean Buddenbrook, decides to marry beneath his station, and is disowned in a particularly acrimonious manner. Hanno, Thomas's son and heir, longs to be freed from his reprehensible duties to the firm and the family, and takes comfort in his ability to express himself through the piano.
Thus, there is little hyperbole in saying that none of the major characters achieve self-actualization. Furthermore, the conservative nature of their business, encapsulated in the ancestral admonition not to do anything that will hinder one's sleep at night, meant that the entrepreneurial spirit of the early days of the firm would slowly be extinguished, to be replaced by an unwillingness to broaden the firm's horizons. One can only imagine Thomas's anguish when one of his grain trades went against the firm. Indeed, his ill-timed demise, paralleling his father's manner of death, was preceded by painful self-examination while burdened by the realization that the firm and his mercantile abilities were on the wane.
The novel, surprisingly, is timeless. The themes resonate clearly even today. Or perhaps, it should not be surprising to learn that fortunes wax and wane, and that wealth and stature are not preconditions for happiness. "Buddenbrooks" should be a must-read for all business students--and students of life.
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Title: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann ISBN: 0679772871 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend by John E. Woods, Thomas Mann ISBN: 0375701168 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 27 July, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Death in Venice and Other Tales by Thomas Mann, Joachim Neugroschel ISBN: 0141181737 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man : The Early Years by Thomas Mann ISBN: 0679739041 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 31 March, 1992 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Death in Venice : And Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann ISBN: 0679722068 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 March, 1989 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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