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"Every good book that is written against Life is still an enticement to live."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
I can't believe it took me twenty years to get to Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks". Since I first read and fell in love with "The Magic Mountain", back in the early nineties, I knew "Buddenbrooks" was around. Why didn't I rush to it in hot pursuit of another Magic Mountain? I am strange that way, I guess, among other ways. Perhaps I also thought that there was no way that it could live up to Magic Mountain, though how could I be so incurious as not to give it a shot, just in case?
Well, I finally got around to it, albeit as an old man now - at least I beat the deadline. When I first picked it up a few weeks ago and thought more seriously about how it is supposed to be about a bourgeois family in decline and decadence, it occurred to me that this might have served as an excellent prelude to Magic Mountain, and I was kicking myself for missing out all these years on reading these two novels together back-to-back. In an early chapter from Magic Mountain, it may be recalled, Mann gives the reader an idea of the prosperous merchant family background from which Hans Castorp came in the flatlands. It's a quick portrait, and we see little Castorp in awe of his great family, the great great great grandfather. It's actually one of the drier chapters. It's evident that Mann just feels obligated to color in that family background a little for readers who stray into Magic Mountain. Well, I was thinking Buddenbrooks promises to do a much better job of that, and it does!
However, it's not quite what I thought it would be. I love the novel: I feel it really picks up the game of drawing-room fiction from the likes of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, taking us into the post-modern world of nihilism and despair. Yet, it's not really a Part One to Magic Mountain's Part Two. It doesn't really feel like a natural continuation. I still wish I tried Buddenbrooks at least ten years ago. I would have liked to have read it at least a couple of times by now. Nevertheless, I cannot say that I find it as enchanting as Magic Mountain. I doubt it will prove to be as compulsively rereadable as that intense study in illness and death that Magic Mountain is. Regardless, it is a great chapter of the Mann legacy to have finally gotten under my belt. These are his two landmark works that won him the Nobel Prize.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
I can't believe it took me twenty years to get to Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks". Since I first read and fell in love with "The Magic Mountain", back in the early nineties, I knew "Buddenbrooks" was around. Why didn't I rush to it in hot pursuit of another Magic Mountain? I am strange that way, I guess, among other ways. Perhaps I also thought that there was no way that it could live up to Magic Mountain, though how could I be so incurious as not to give it a shot, just in case?
Well, I finally got around to it, albeit as an old man now - at least I beat the deadline. When I first picked it up a few weeks ago and thought more seriously about how it is supposed to be about a bourgeois family in decline and decadence, it occurred to me that this might have served as an excellent prelude to Magic Mountain, and I was kicking myself for missing out all these years on reading these two novels together back-to-back. In an early chapter from Magic Mountain, it may be recalled, Mann gives the reader an idea of the prosperous merchant family background from which Hans Castorp came in the flatlands. It's a quick portrait, and we see little Castorp in awe of his great family, the great great great grandfather. It's actually one of the drier chapters. It's evident that Mann just feels obligated to color in that family background a little for readers who stray into Magic Mountain. Well, I was thinking Buddenbrooks promises to do a much better job of that, and it does!
However, it's not quite what I thought it would be. I love the novel: I feel it really picks up the game of drawing-room fiction from the likes of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, taking us into the post-modern world of nihilism and despair. Yet, it's not really a Part One to Magic Mountain's Part Two. It doesn't really feel like a natural continuation. I still wish I tried Buddenbrooks at least ten years ago. I would have liked to have read it at least a couple of times by now. Nevertheless, I cannot say that I find it as enchanting as Magic Mountain. I doubt it will prove to be as compulsively rereadable as that intense study in illness and death that Magic Mountain is. Regardless, it is a great chapter of the Mann legacy to have finally gotten under my belt. These are his two landmark works that won him the Nobel Prize.
