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Buddenbrooks: the Decline of a Family (Vintage International)

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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. One of the more famous aspects of Thomas Mann's prose style can be seen in the use of leitmotifs. Derived from his admiration for the operas of Richard Wagner, in the case of Buddenbrooks an example can be found in the description of the color – blue and yellow, respectively – of the skin and the teeth of the characters. Each such description alludes to different states of health, personality and even the destiny of the characters. Rotting teeth are also a symbol of decay and decadence because it implies indulging in too many cavity-causing foods. An example of this would be Hanno's cup of hot chocolate at breakfast. until, in the summer of 1900, he mailed off a huge manuscript written on both sides of lined foolscap.

Frau Consul Elizabeth Kröger Buddenbrook (ay- LEE-sah-bat KROH-gehr), the wife of Jean Buddenbrook. A woman of the world and a lover of life, she becomes well known in her later years for her piety and her numerous charities. After a long life with her family, she dies of pneumonia. E' la storia, lungo tre generazione, di una ricca famiglia di commercianti, nella Lubecca borghese e intraprendente dell'autore stesso.While Thomas embodies the vitality, strength and vigor of a prosperous, responsible merchant of the time, his hypochondriac, indolent brother Christian and eventually Thomas’ introverted and frail son, Hanno, fail their merchant inheritance in allowing their artistic vocation to prevail over their duty to the firm, condemning the Buddenbrook name into oblivion. Wonderful writing. Very descriptive, but in a good way. You see everything right before your eyes. There is humor. The events pull you in. When terrible things happen, even to people you dislike, you care, you need to know how the problem will be resolved. All occurrences in the lives of the characters are seen by the narrator and the family members in relation to the family trade business: the sense of duty and destiny accompanying it as well as the economic consequences that events bring. Through births, marriages, and deaths, the business becomes almost a fetish or a religion, especially for some characters, notably Thomas and his sister Tony. The treatment of the female main character Tony Buddenbrook in the novel resembles the 19th-century realists ( Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina), but from a more ironic and less tragic point of view. owes much of its humor and the sharpness of its characterizations. "This difficulty is insuperable," she concluded. "Dialect cannot be transferred." Accordingly, she leveled Mann's colorful variety of speech

moved the family and the business into one of the most handsome houses in town. As the novel begins, he is holding his 8-year-old granddaughter Tony on his knee and testing her playfully on her Lutheran catechism. In the course of La saga famigliare de “I Buddenbrook” è un meraviglioso ed appassionante romanzo che mi ha fatto scoprire la freschezza di Mann.It is Thomas who is supposed to later take on the responsibility of continuing the family tradition, regardless of the cost. Mann weaves his narrative work starting with this main family, and then across several generations.

I read a review recently of a historical novel. The reviewer believed that most historical novels fail, because they depict characters with a modern consciousness. These characters often defy the thinking of their times and act in ways that we can approve of. This novel is not historical fiction, but the fact that it was written over a hundred years ago and is full of completely recognisable, very vivid, and obviously historically accurate characters is just one of the things that wowed me about this book, Thomas Mann's first. Sure, the characters do not hold all our values, but they are so like us, in good ways and bad ways, that it reminded me that our lives, in a sense, have been lived before.

As the older children grow up, their personalities begin to show. Diligent and industrious Thomas seems likely to inherit the business some day. By contrast, Christian is more interested in entertainment and leisure. Tony has grown quite conceited and spurns an advance from the son of another up-and-coming family, Herman Hagenström. Herman takes it in stride, but Tony bears a grudge against him for the rest of her life. The elder Johann and Antoinette die, and the younger Johann takes over the business, and gives Gotthold his fair share of the inheritance. The half-brothers will never be close, though, and Gotthold's three spinster daughters continue to resent Johann's side of the family, and delight in their misfortune over the coming years. Thomas goes to Amsterdam to study, while Tony goes to boarding school. After finishing school, Tony remains lifelong friends with her former teacher, Therese "Sesemi" Weichbrodt. There is a concept in statistics, Regression or Reversion to the Mean, which is widely used in a variety of fields of knowledge. It was first realized by Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, when he worked on the correlation of heights between adult children and parents. Hugo Weinschenk ( WIN-shank), Erica’s husband, a crude, pompous, self-made man, the middle-aged Silesian director of a fire insurance company. Convicted of unscrupulous business practices, he goes to prison. Upon his release and after a brief visit with the Buddenbrooks, he disappears. The concept refers to the tendency for any variable which exhibits an extreme value at any point of measurement to move towards the average next time it is measured. He disfrutado muchísimo de la lectura, de sus personajes, de la veracidad de sus sentimientos, de sus imperfecciones y lo fácil que resultaba empatizar con todos ellos, me ha encantado descubrir a ese Mann tan analítico pero divertido, un observador de su tiempo y de cada detalle que conforman el carácter de una persona.

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