Buddenbrooks

• Buddenbrooks
  Author: Thomas Mann 1900 648 pp
  My rating: 4.5*
  Started June 6 2008, Finished June 12 2008
  
  “ … to use a situation without any sense of shame, he told himself, that is what it means to be fit for real life.” (p 543)
  
  Mann’s early masterpiece, published when he was in his mid 20’s and set in the mid-19th century, chronicles four generations of the titular merchant family as it devolves from prosperity to disintegration. It brought to my mind a variety of referents, from The Godfather, with which there is a strong “weak son” parallel between Christian and Fredo, to The Naked and the Dead, another precocious tour de force. Published in 1900, this is more of a descriptive “19th century” novel as compared with the introspective, idea-driven The Magic Mountain; it is fair to say that the plot driven Buddenbrooks is a much easier read and that most readers will find it more appealing than its counterpart in Mann’s oeuvre.
  A few themes particularly captured my attention:
  
  
• That the Buddenbrooks’ existence was driven entirely by appearances – aside from black sheep Christian, the family members are almost entirely motivated by how their actions will reflect on the reputation of the family. None of the characters is permitted an inner life beyond a commanding sense of duty, a notion explicitly expressed by Thomas in denouncing Christian’s tendency to introspection: “And for me the important thing is control and balance. There will always be people for whom this sort of interest in oneself, this probing observation of one’s own sensibilities, is appropriate … But we are just simple merchants, my dear; our self-observations are dreadfully petty.” (p 233)
  
• How constrained the lives of women of their class were – the end of all of a woman’s life was to make a “good marriage”, one that would somehow redound to the benefit of the family. A woman of this class from a family that had fallen on hard times and was incapable of funding a dowry had no chance of suitable marriage and thus was condemned to a life of spinsterhood.
  
• Class-consciousness, as in the entire portion of Mann’s work that I have been exposed to, is pervasive. Even the servants are snobs: “And Ida Jungmann had her self-respect, too. She knew who she was, and if some ordinary servant girl sat down with her ward on the same bench … and started a conversation as if they were equals, Mamselle Jungmann would say ‘Erika dear, I feel a draft,’ and depart.” (p 215)
  
• Dentistry in the era before anesthetics was a truly grim affair. The reader feels deeply for little Hanno, the family’s final scion, whose poor teeth force him to undergo regular extractions, which as his father Thomas, preparing himself to have a single tooth removed, anticipates thusly: “This will get worse and worse and rage out of control until I can’t bear it anymore, and then comes the real catastrophe and an insane, screaming, inhuman pain will rip my entire brain to shreds.” (p 583)
  
  Finally there is the following nugget -- in prose that would feel entirely in place in the pages of a Tom Wolfe novel -- concluding a financial showdown that quite reminded me of the “workout” scene of A Man In Full with its defenseless debtors, remorseless creditors and a devastating litany of unpayable debt: “The consul stood at the door, pale as death, the knob in his hand. Shivers of horror ran down his back. Was he really trapped in this little dimly lit room with a swindler and a vicious ape gone mad?” (p 200)