Buddenbrooks: the Decline of a Family (Vintage International)

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This is my first Goodreads reading group experience and I have to thank both Kalliope and Kris for having pointed this work out to me and for having allowed me to participate. I also want to give thanks to all the reading partners who keep posting invaluable comments which have helped me to better grasp the nature of this novel. Yeah, I get that it’s a portrait of what family life was like in this specific time and place, and there’s the whole thing with the tooth decay metaphor… but, you see, I felt like Mann put more feeling into writing about their teeth than into writing about their personalities. After a while, the repetitive metaphor of tooth decay for the decay of a family didn't seem that clever anymore. I guess I'll have to see if The Magic Mountain or Death in Venice are any better. skeptical grandfather and at the end with her aged teacher, who has always waged the good fight "against the onslaughts of reason." Antonie (Tony) Buddenbrook ( AHN-toh-nee), later Frau Grünlich, and Frau Permaneder, Jean’s oldest child. She has ash-blonde hair, gray-blue eyes, and finely shaped but stumpy hands. Impetuous in youth, she becomes conventional in maturity, but to her brother Tom she always remains a child in her reactions to the incidents in her life. She easily adapts herself to any situation; she is not humiliated by the dissolution of her marriage to Grünlich and is proud of the fact that she becomes a person of importance in the family. She adapts as readily to the breaking up of her marriage to Permaneder. As she develops a closer intimacy with her father following her first divorce, she recognizes and establishes closer ties with Tom after the death of their father. She sees the two of them as true Buddenbrooks, for their brother Christian does not really seem one of the family, and young Clara remains an unimportant sister. The retention of dignity for both herself and the family becomes almost a religion with Tony.

From an early age, Thomas Mann was influenced by Schopenhauer's pessimistic notion of the will being a blind force at work in the world. Thus, there is likewise no escape for the Buddenbrooks. They speak of emotions and morality, yet it is money and economics that steer the ship. Failure, decline and even death seem to be the only viable outcome.Los verdaderos protagonistas de la historia son Tony y Thomas, hermanos que vamos a ver desde niños hasta el final de sus días y que ocupan la mayor parte de la trama, y así como el inicio del libro y la primera parte (más protagonizada por Tony) es mucho más ligera y optimista, la segunda, protagonizada por su hermano Thomas y su hijo deja un regusto amargo por la tristeza que desprende. He amado profundamente ambos personajes y creo que son de esos que no se me irán nunca de la cabeza... Morten Schartzkopf ( MOHR-tehn SCHAHRTS-kopf), a charming, serious-minded, liberal-thinking but naïve medical student whose brief romance with Tony is broken up when Grünlich reports to Morten’s father a prior claim on Tony. Bendix Grünlich ( BEHN-dihks GREWN-lihsh), Tony’s first husband, a well-to-do Hamburg merchant and a pink-faced, blue-eyed, golden-whiskered, obsequious flatterer and rascal. His bogus charm takes in Jean, who urges Tony to marry him despite her disgust for him. When his impending bankruptcy later leads him to seek money from Jean, Buddenbrook angrily discovers that Grünlich, even before marrying Tony, had unscrupulously capitalized on his supposed connection with the family. A divorce follows shortly after Tony’s return to her parents’ home with her daughter. Buddenbrooks is recommended for those who think that huge ponderous family sagas by Nobel prize-winning authors are by definition good for the soul.

Buddenbrook’s sense of propriety. Christian becomes more and more a neurotic and a hypochondriac as he ages. After Tom’s death, Christian marries his mistress, who not long afterward has to put him in a mental institution. Like Tom’s son Hanno, he symbolizes the decay of the Buddenbrook family. The concerns with philosophy and music that Mann developed further in The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus here suggest that the decline in the world is balanced by an inner refinement. That the increasing interior richness of their lives renders them unable to compete with their local rivals, the grossly corporeal Hagenstrom family. For all their status inside the city the new Germany is dominated by the old landed aristocracy - something that will be expressed with more brutality and bitterness in Man of Straw by Tom's brother Henrich Mann.

Facts

E' la storia, lungo tre generazione, di una ricca famiglia di commercianti, nella Lubecca borghese e intraprendente dell'autore stesso. Heilbut, Anthony. Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature. Riverside: University of California Press, 1997. Of the many works by the renowned German author Thomas Mann (1875–1955), including Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, none match the epic proportion or literary legacy of the novel Buddenbrooks. Written early in his career, this story of the decline of the family symbolized by the Buddenbrooks chronicles not simply an increase in generational disregard for familial responsibility, but also acts as a redefinition of the limitations imposed on the individual members of the family. The novel traces the transfer of importance from familial duty to self-fulfillment despite the hopes and expectations coveted by passing generations. Mann constructs a history covering four generations, beginning at the apex of business success for the Buddenbrook family and ending with their extinction as the sole surviving progeny succumbs to typhus. The basic plot of this first novel corresponds to Mann’s own ambivalent feelings about the bourgeois life while reflecting the personal tension he experienced as a young artist to pursue his father’s business interests.