Rating: 
Summary: The Music of Time and Character
Review: This is a beautiful narrative, which will stay with you forever, if not in detail then in the musical arc of its composition. The book is about a family, the Buddenbrooks, who are wealthy but not aristocrats, who have as their solid moral foundation the maintenance of the family business. The degree to which each member of the family supports and conforms to this moral code, and the degree to which their personal motives and the turns of fate conflict with them, determines the level of tension at any given point in the narrative.
The narrative moves through the first third of the book in a series of sometimes startlingly short chapters, introducing the characters and the musical threads that will repeat and vary throughout the rest of the novel. It's actually quite refreshing to read, not heavy at all. But the psychological depth is also not there, except in the reader's probable discomfort with the moral code being expressed.
In the second third, after the death of the pious and morally-firm Jean, the first son Thomas assumes control of the family, and the narrative begins to reflect the deep dissatisfaction with the family values that Thomas suppresses for the rest of his life. Thomas's sister, Tony, and his brother, Christian, provide the extremes of adaptation to un-felt values.
Tony begins her theme in a Romeo and Juliet story where Juliet accepts her fate and marries Paris, finding in this surrender the beauty of piety, as exemplified by her father. With great exuberance she literally writes her theme in the family history (a journal/scrapbook). Anyone who does not conform to the moral code of the family is evil (sometimes real, sometimes not), and she finds redemption and purity in expressing her hatred of this evil. At the end, she expresses her doubt in the tenets of Christianity, but never loses faith in the value of the family code.
Christian is the quintessential failure, giving in to personal tastes and psychological self-absorption. He revels in his weakness, constantly referring to his aches and pains, and by being so weak does not succeed in creating an acceptable alternative morality. Thomas sees in his brother that which he hates and suppresses in himself.
Thomas is the balance, and the champion of the moral code. As long as he lives the family business goes on, despite the attacks of global economy and the slippage of occasional moral failures. Only near the end of his life does he question the very values he embodies, in a metaphysical exploration very foreign to the rest of his life.
The final third of the novel is dominated by the music, symbolic and actual, of Thomas's son, Johann. "Little Hanno" is a musical prodigy, a tortured artist if there ever was one. The life and world that he is born into causes him nothing but pain and fear, with his only refuge being his music, and the friendship of a wild aristocratic wolf-boy with literary talent. The final chapters are deep, existential, and brilliantly beautiful in their imagery and metaphor. The end of the novel is nothing like the beginning.
Near the end of the novel, Hanno improvises a piece on the piano which, wonderfully described by Mann, mirrors and resolves the entire narrative. When you read this chapter, you will see that the entire book, and by extension the entire history of this family, has been a musical work.
Sounds very thick, and it is, but it's also a very easy read. You'll be happy you did.
Rating:
Summary: This book won Thomas Mann a well-deserved Nobel Prize
Review: After viewing the German artistic mini-series for television many years ago, I decided to read this German family story to rival Galsworthy's Forsythe Saga. I was not disappointed, because this book deals, among others, with one essential aspect of human existence: man's difficulty in adapting to hardships and changes in social status. The story of the Buddenbrooks is a story of moral values among individuals who, although belong to the same family, can be astonishingly different in their understanding of life and their grasp of reality. In this family we see characters who are able to adapt, understand the world and compromise, while at the same time we are exposed to those who are limited by their own upbringing to a life of limited flexibility and eventual disillusion and self-abandon. This fundamental book of world literature attacks two antithetic facets of human nature, two views of the world that are constantly at battle within all human beings. It is for this reason that "Buddenbrooks" is fundamentally an allegory about man and his internal turmoil with the major challenges of life, a carefully crafted story with psychological insight that makes the reading of this book definitely worthwhile
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended!
Review: Buddenbrooks is an amazing novel, both in scope and its beautifully rendered characters. The story concerns the Buddenbrook family and their life as prosperous merchants in Lubeck in the 1800s. At the beginning, the main characters are Johann and his son Johann, but as the novel continues both die and the focus shifts to the son of younger Johann, Thomas. All the characters are lifelike, each with their own distinct personalities. The most impressive facet of the novel is how true to life it is. The translation is also excellent, the novel is readable and there are few passages that are tough to decipher. Buddenbrooks is quite long, but with the exceptions of some dry parts near the middle it is an exciting and easy read.
Rating:
Summary: A beautifully written, very readable classic.
Review: Buddenbrooks is superbly written, splendidly elegant fiction of the best kind. The novel follows the life of a family (the Buddenbrook family) for the course of about fifty years, and outlines all the various triumphs, struggles, failures, and heartaches that accompany this upper middle-class family. Much of the action centers around the family firm, run by the eldest male. This firm is the source of the Buddenbrooks' prestige--it is because of the firm, and its blossoming business, that allows the family to travel in the high circle of their community.
Essentially, this book is about the decline of the family (hence the subtitle). But the Buddenbrooks' fall is not abrupt--their decline is not steady. Divorces, bad business deals, and bankruptcies are offset by profitable marriages, years of prosperity, and various other triumphs. The decline is detailed mostly in the character of Thomas, the third consul mentioned in the book. Through him, and his siblings as well, we are able to see the struggle to maintain dignity, the fight for a prosperous family to save face in any circumstance. And, more than that, we see Thomas being trapped, trapped in a lifestyle and a society in which he is not allowed to relax even for a moment, lest everything come crashing down around him.
Thomas Mann is a brilliant author (he wrote this when he was 25!), a wonderful stylist whose elegant prose and smoothly flowing narrative are the real treat of this work. For an entertaining and stimulating read, give Buddenbrooks a try. You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: A beautifully written, very readable classic.
Review: Buddenbrooks is superbly written, splendidly elegant fiction of the best kind. The novel follows the life of a family (the Buddenbrook family) for the course of about fifty years, and outlines all the various triumphs, struggles, failures, and heartaches that accompany this upper middle-class family. Much of the action centers around the family firm, run by the eldest male. This firm is the source of the Buddenbrooks' prestige--it is because of the firm, and its blossoming business, that allows the family to travel in the high circle of their community.
Essentially, this book is about the decline of the family (hence the subtitle). But the Buddenbrooks' fall is not abrupt--their decline is not steady. Divorces, bad business deals, and bankruptcies are offset by profitable marriages, years of prosperity, and various other triumphs. The decline is detailed mostly in the character of Thomas, the third consul mentioned in the book. Through him, and his siblings as well, we are able to see the struggle to maintain dignity, the fight for a prosperous family to save face in any circumstance. And, more than that, we see Thomas being trapped, trapped in a lifestyle and a society in which he is not allowed to relax even for a moment, lest everything come crashing down around him.
Thomas Mann is a brilliant author (he wrote this when he was 25!), a wonderful stylist whose elegant prose and smoothly flowing narrative are the real treat of this work. For an entertaining and stimulating read, give Buddenbrooks a try. You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Without a doubt, worthy of a Nobel Prize
Review: Buddenbrooks is the most autobiographical of Mann's works--and the one that most of all, earned Mann the Nobel Prize for Literature.Mann grew up in a prosperous Luebeck family, son of a merchant father who died in 1891. The dissolution of the family firm, the artistic, Southern Creole background of Mann's mother and the struggle between the materialistic merchant side and the wild, artistic side are the backdrop for a deep regret, maybe even self-recrimination, for the family's ultimate decline. The family line ends, in Buddenbrooks with Hanno, son of successful and foppish Senator Thomas Buddenbrooks. When Thomas dies, the family firm is broken up and the family starts the deep decline already in process. Hanno's red-haired, violin-playing mother couldn't care less. ("I live for Art" would seem to have been written with her in mind.) Hanno's aunt Toni is left to mourn the family's end--though Toni's own earnest efforts to hold up family honor also ended in disaster. Some declines, apparently, are natural and cannot be prevented. Interestingly, Mann puts a bit of himself in Toni as well as Hanno; he worked for a fire insurance company as did Toni's luckless son-in-law, he moved to Munich as Toni did in Buddenbrooks. The other characters, Thomas's ne'er-do-well brother Christian, and especially the grandparents are beautifully drawn and developed. This is one of the best family chronicles written, and even if you don't love "great literature" you will enjoy this book. It's been filmed as well as a mini-series, but frankly, nothing comes up to reading this for yourself. I couldn't put this novel down once I started it. And it is a hefty book, though not the longest by Mann. You can still go see the house on Broad Street (Breitstrasse) (though not go in, it's privately owned) in Luebeck and walk the quaint alleyways where Mann grew up--and even the Waldhotel Riesebusch where the Buddenbrooks family enjoyed an outing is still in operation, with the same sloping lawns, in nearby Schwartau.
Rating: 
Summary: A CHRONICLE OF THE GERMAN MIDDLE CLASS
Review: Considered by many to be the greatest German novelest of the 20th Century, Thomas Mann, in his first great novel, Buddenbrooks, chronicles the life and decline of what must be taken to be a typical 19th Century German middle class family. The Buddenbrooks, a conservative and traditional mercantile family (Johann Buddenbrooks, the family patriarch, sells grain for a living), live in a smallish Northern German town in which they, among other characters in the book, figure prominently as both local notables and political players. However, while this is a family chronicle that is reputed to mirror the joys and travails of Mann's own family, what is glaringly absent from Buddenbrooks is any concern or mention of, other than one in passing, any of the great events which forged the fate of modern Germany. While more than likely an intensional omission on the part of Mann, an omission that may be a telling signal to the reader of the insularity of upper middle class life in 19th Century Germany, the chonicle itself seems to suffer somewhat from the fact that the family seems to be relatively unaffected by the wars, the plebian revolutions of the 1940s--or by the great Franco Prussian war of 1870. Beginning in the 1830s, the family sees its business rise in the wake of the chaos brought by Napoleon 25 years earlier: children are born, grow up into different fates and pursuits, and this mirror of the mercantile classes of German hints at the wonders of an essentially modern era that since has been hailed as a national renaissance. Fashionable, comfortable, concerned with reputation, the Buddenbrooks family is not all that unlike many of the upper class families in America. Like the rise of a new nobility that has come to bear upon the ages in the footsteps of industrialization and the democratic impulse, the Buddenbrooks chronicles reveals just how modern in spirit Germany was in an era its people dominated the European spirit. What carries this novel is its writing. Mann's style is exceptionally malleable: The descriptions are not only evocative, they are often powerfully emotional, full of the spirit of the times and revealing in themselves of the 19th Century German character. The dialogue is impeccable, the characters memorable and, like all family chronicles, the mundane events are not only entertaining and often funny, they are universal as well. All in all, Buddenbrooks was a much more rewarding book to read than I had expected.
Rating:
Summary: A Surprisingly Resonant Portrayal of a Lost Era
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Empire falls
Review: More than a book, "Buddenbrooks - The Decline of a Family" is a literary event. Written when Thomas Mann was in his mid-20s this novel is one among his innumerous masterpieces. From the beginning, the author displays an eye for details, for character development among other qualities, but the major characteristic of the book is to show how global events can affect a family.
This device is very subtle in Mann's narrative, therefore appealing. The Buddenbrooks are in the center of the events, but the world --which by that time wasn't `global' yet-- was changing and it reflects in the familiar dynamics. Every now and then, economy and politics are the main topic of a chapter, but it is always reflecting on the Buddenbrooks.
They are a rich family that is losing their empire. As the time changes, so do the member's mentality -- or not. This is one of the most touching issue in the book. Many people can't come to terms with the changes. Most Buddenbrooks are linked to past that is over.
The novel covers four generations of this family. As the narrative unfolds, it is the last Buddenbrooks that will suffer more the lost of their money and position. It is very interesting to follow their decline -- from the rich beginning until the unfortunate ending.
The members of the family are very vivid and human -- and with that, Mann brings up a complex human panel. But all of characters are very active and attractive to the readers. Each of them has their motivations and mind. But it seems that narrow-mindedness runs in the family. Every Buddenbrooks who tries to go against the family's will is suffocated. Tony is forced to marry someone who would make a more profitable marriage than the man she loves. Christian is forced to quite the arts and his way of life because it does not please his brother. And more members will suffer with it.
Starting as a family chronicles, "Buddenbrooks" ends almost like an epic. The Noble Prize winner writer has set the pattern for this kind of book. Many were influenced by Mann's style and topic -- even those who don't know it. I think that Lanpedusa's "The Leopard", DeLilo's "White Noise" and Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" are among the books that received a positive influence from the master.
Rating:
Summary: Decadence of a family
Review: This novel (from the hand of Thomas Mann) was published in the early years of the XXth century. It tells the story of the decadence of a burgouise family, from its highest point of economic power, to its desintegration. The beginning of the novel has to do with the new house that has been bought by the patriach of the family. We meet there the three brothers, whose actions will be followed in the novel. Thomas, Cristian and Tony (Antoinnete). As they grow up, they learn the rules to survive their society and maintain their status. Tony has to learn that she cannot follow her love, if it is against the interests of her family. Thomas learns that he must follow the footsteps of his father... and Christian learns that he has no role in the world, but to annoy his brother. The world changes as it brings new rich people to town, with new ways of making business. Slowly the Buddenbrooks begin to lose their economic stability. This novel from Thomas Mann (a somewhat autobiographical one) describes the spaces, making it clear through them the kind of world this family lives in. There is a sharp picture of the characters... not only physical, but mental.
I will always remember Tony's romance in Travemünde, and how an idilic place is beautifully described, only to be soon reminded, that it is only a romantic fantasy... no more than that. Her later marriage is memorable, too. It is heartbreaking and humilliating. Another memorable moment is the realization of Thomas', that his son is not to follow his footsteps into the family business. Finally, watch for that description of the last of the Buddenbrooks' normal day: how terrifying was school for him... his friendships and his ailment. It is just adorable and moving.
Mann's acute use of irony allows the reader to follow these intense and funny moments (like the revolution being put to rest after the senator Buddenbrook tells the people that they already had a revolution) without losing the ability to think these episodes in a broader picture (cultural, social and political).
This book is worth not only buying and having, but to read... and more than that... to read it more than once. It's a real work of art.
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