Buddenbrooks
The great German family novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author
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4.4 • 11 Ratings
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
The Buddenbrooks know how to preserve appearances. Their tragedy is that appearances cannot preserve them.
Wealthy, esteemed and deeply rooted in tradition, the Buddenbrook family epitomises nineteenth-century German bourgeois values.
Set chiefly in Lübeck between the 1830s and the 1870s, Thomas Mann’s family saga follows the Buddenbrooks from civic confidence and commercial success towards gradual dissolution. Across four generations, business decisions, marriages, inheritances, illness and private disappointments reveal the strain beneath the family’s public respectability.
Tony, Thomas, Christian and Hanno each carry a different part of the family’s burden: status, duty, instability, art and decline. As the world around them changes, the principles that built the Buddenbrooks’ success can no longer protect them.
What gives the novel its force is Mann’s patience. He lets decline appear not as catastrophe, but as a series of ordinary decisions, disappointments and evasions, until the Buddenbrook name has become a memory of itself.
(Cover may vary)
'Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A superior new translation of Mann's 1901 saga about four generations of an affluent German family.
Customer Reviews
Great book shame about the printing errors
Some examples.
“And to be furnished with the sinews of their spiritual warfare”.
“Thank you for the consideration you snow me in asking for my consent”.
“Both brothers had their lathes with them - for the lawyer had married, some years since...”
“Thomas let his eye rove discreedy over the heads of the two standing outside...”
“And though the hideous circumstances made this seem like mockery, yet Hanno felt for the bird a curious mature of fear and affection...”
“A cold rain was failing, and a high wind drove it against the window panes.”
“I’ll get you shut up, I’ll ruin you - I’ll rain you, you understand?”
“Have you no money Christian? Then I’ll end it to you.”