Review: Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, by Thomas Mann

At the risk of sounding like Frau Permaneder, it’s amazing how much more I get from this book after an absence of a decade or so. I first read Buddenbrooks in my late teens/early twenties, and at that time I recall feeling a good deal of childish contempt for many of the characters. But on later readings I find myself understanding them on a deeper level, and feeling sympathy for them even when I want to whup them upside the head and say, “Just stop!”

I read a review of this book by someone who kept looking for the protagonist, and not finding one, dismissed the story. But the family is the protagonist, a kind of individual body politic. We see it risen from a merchant “who did very well,” to a firm that is thriving. And in spite of their humble beginnings, it’s clear that the family, as a whole, senses that it is part of an aristocracy of trade. What one member does, affects the others, and their standing in society.

But as societies grow, change, and fall, so does the Buddenbrook family, illustrated by the lives of the three children of Johann (Jean) and Elizabeth, Thomas, Christian, and Antonie (Tony). Tony is virtually sold in marriage to Bendix Grünlich, and when his fortunes fail, she returns home with their daughter, determined not to allow her misfortune to affect the family’s fortunes, though she is alive to slights from society, and we’re never entirely certain if they’re real or imagined. Christian is the ne’er-do-well son, tortured by nervous complaints, and an inability to concentrate on anything but his pleasures.

But it’s Tom who is the family in small. He grows up knowing that he will become the head of the firm, and gives up the hope of higher education to join his father there. He’s a voracious reader, and fancies himself a free thinker, rejecting what he sees as the syrupy piety of his parents. He marries an “artistic” woman and they produce one sickly, artistic child. And as the story progresses and we come to know Tom through his responses to all that happens in his family, we feel he is well adjusted and happy.

And then we get a glimpse of his internal life and it’s devastating. Tom is a mess.  He is torn between the good, solid virtues of the merchant class, and the demands of his social position, and his longing for a life of the mind, and a true understanding of his wife and son, something he will never have, maybe because he’s incapable, or maybe just because he can’t allow himself to unbend enough to meet them on their terms.

There is so very much to discuss about this book, the irony, the symbolic content of things like the condition of people’s teeth (For Mann, this is telling. Good teeth signify strength, bad ones signal a kind of decadence.) The painstaking descriptions of rooms and their furnishings forcibly underscores the importance of material goods to this family. The repetition of conversation, and even phrases, seem to highlight how little of importance is ever dealt with in their intellectual lives. The prices of things are quoted repeatedly, emphasizing that for the Buddenbrook family, it is all about money.

What I found fascinating this time around were the long descriptions of the dying of family members, painful to read, and yet upon the occasion of the final death in the book, the author steps back and describes what happens during a bout of typhoid without ever telling the reader who it is who is dying. (We find out in the last chapter.) It’s a strange choice, and I haven’t entirely decided what to make of it.

This time around, I listened to the audiobook, read by David Rintoul, and found it enthralling. I know the book well, and yet Rintoul made it so vivid that I often felt I was hearing it for the first time. (That may also have something to do with the new translation, since I’ve always read the Porter translation prior to this reread.) I really recommend it if you’re a fan of audiobooks.

Mann, who had previously written only short stories — yes, this was his first novel — went on to win a Nobel prize for literature, with the committee citing Buddenbrooks as a primary reason for the award in spite of the prizes normally being awarded for a body of work. It’s an astounding achievement, and one that I never tire of revisiting.