(12/11/2007) Buddenbrooks: 2 Volumes by Thomas Mann. New York. 1924. Knopf. Translated From The German By H. T. Lowe-Porter. keywords: Literature Germany Translated. 748 pages.
BUDDENBROOKS may not always receive its proper due since it inevitably must dwell in the shadow of Mann’s masterwork, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. It is however an engrossing tale of the decline in fortunes of a middle-class German family in the early 20th century.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
BUDDENBROOKS, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modern literature - the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle- class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity - seductions that are at variance with its own traditions - its downfall becomes certain. In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, BUDDENBROOKS surpasses all other modern family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann’s novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all. THOMAS MANN was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.
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