In the Library
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann, 1901
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 17 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (1924)
- Original
- Original de
- Chapters
- Chapters 97
- Length
- Length 230k words
£1.99
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In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
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About the book
In the old gilt-edged book where the Buddenbrooks have recorded four generations of their births and deaths, little Hanno takes a pen and draws two clean lines beneath his own name. Asked why, he can only say he thought nothing more was coming. He is right. Thomas Mann's chronicle of a Lübeck grain dynasty is a study of how a family dies not from catastrophe but from refinement: each generation inherits the firm along with a finer, more trembling nervous system, until the commercial nerve thins entirely into music and longing and the wish to be left alone. Thomas the Senator reads Schopenhauer one winter night and tastes, for an hour, the dissolution of the self into something vast; by morning he is back at his desk, and it saves no one. The terrible tenderness of the book is that it loves what is killing them. To grow this beautiful, Mann saw, is to grow unfit to live.