Buddenbrooks would be an impressive work no matter the author's age, but the fact that Thomas Mann was only 26 when he published it is nothing short of astounding. My admiration has less to do with his prose style, cinematic in the breadth and particularity of his observation, than his maturity. How could someone as young as he have seen the past and Germany so clearly?
After reading The Magician and re-reading Death In Venice as a result, I approached the book that put Mann on the literary map with trepidation. Would this doorstopper be as difficult as The Magic Mountain? Would I have the patience to plow through the story of a bourgeoisie family's decline? But , and the book had once been a runaway bestseller, so I finally bit the bullet. Silly me--it turned out to be a page-turner of the first order--due in part, no doubt, to a fluid and idiomatic translation by John E. Woods--and some of the locations were familiar because I'd actually visited the author's home in Lübeck, where the action takes place over several generations . Even better, it's the kind of novel that educates you as you hurtle towards the end. July Monarchy? Hanseatic League? Mostly new to me but all in service to the plot rather than a meaningless display of the author's erudition.
Mann begins his Teutonic soap opera in a house where Napoleon's soldiers have stolen some of the Buddenbrooks silver. He focuses primarily on the lives of Thomas and Antonie, siblings who experience the mercantile family's diminishing fortunes as well as society's changing social mores in small-town, northern Germany for much of the 19th century. Think Peyton Place with Plattdeutsche accents!
Previously, I used the word cinematic to describe Mann's prose style. It takes you back to a time when the world relied on words rather than images to conjure scenes both domestic:
The consul’s wife was sitting on the yellow sofa, next to her husband, who was smoking a cigar and scanning the market quotations in the Advertiser. She was bent down over her silk embroidery, her lips moving slightly as she counted a row of stitches with her needle. Six candles were burning in the candelabrum on the dainty, gold detailed sewing table beside her; the chandelier was not in use.
. . . and mercantile:
The center of town was lively and crowded – it was Saturday, market day. The butchers had set up their stalls under the pointed arches of the town-hall arcades, and they weighed their wares with bloody hands. The stalls of the fish market, however, had been grouped around the fountain out in the market square itself. And there plump women sat, burying their hands in fur muffs half smooth from wear and warming their feet at charcoal burners; they guarded their cold, wet prisoners and called out in broad accents, inviting the strolling crooks and housewives to buy. There was no danger of being cheated. You could be sure that you were buying fresh fish— almost all these fat, muscular fish were still alive. Some of them had it good. They swim about in the rather cramped quarters of buckets, true, but they seem to be in fine spirits and enduring no hardships. Others lay there in agony on planks with ghastly googly eyes and laboring gills, clinging to life and desperately flapping their tails until someone grabbed them and a sharp, bloody knife cut their throats with a loud crunch. Long, fat eels twisted about and contorted themselves into fantastic shapes. Deep that teamed with blackish masses of Baltic shrimp. Sometimes a sturdy flounder would contract in a spasm of mad terror and flip off its plank, landing among the offal on the slippery cobblestones, so that its owner would have to run after it and scold it severely before returning it to the line of duty.
Here's the tradition that forces Antonie into the first of two terrible marriages after relinquishing the love of her life, the only person who could have helped her overcome a bitter and provincial narrow mindedness:
We are not born, my dear daughter, to pursue our own personal happiness, for we are not separate, independent, self-subsisting individuals, but links in a chain; and it is inconceivable that we would be what we are without those who have preceded us and shown us the path that they themselves have scrupulously trod, looking either to the left nor to the right, but rather, following a venerable and trustworthy tradition. Your path, it seems to me, has been obvious for many weeks now, it’s course clearly defined, and you would surely not be my daughter, the granddaughter of your grandfather, who rests now in God, indeed would not be a worthy link in our family’s chain if, of your own accord and out of stubbornness and frivolity, you seriously intended to follow an aberrant path of your own. I beg you my dear Antonie, to ponder these things in your heart.
Much later, there's Thomas's midlife crisis which produces this sad, inevitable epiphany:
What is success? A mysterious, indescribable power – a vigilance, a readiness, the awareness that simply by my presence I can exert pressure on the movements of life around me, the belief that life can be molded to my advantage. Happiness and success are inside us. We have to reach deep and hold tight. And the moment something begins to subside, to relax, to grow weary, then everything around us is turned loose, resists us, rebels, moves beyond our influence. And then it’s just one thing after another, one setback after another, and you’re finished. The last few days I’ve been thinking about a Turkish proverb I read somewhere: ‘When the house is finished, death follows.’ Now, it doesn’t have to be death exactly. But retreat, decline, the beginning of the end.
And then a remarkable metaphor for orgasm in a musical child, quite possibly gay, who dies too young to ever experience the real thing:
And now came the ending, Hanno’s beloved finale, which was to add the final simple, sublime touch to the whole composition. Wrapped in the sparkling bubbling runs of the violin, which rang out with gentle, bell- like purity, he struck the E minor chord tremolo pianissimo. It grew, broadened, swelled slowly, very slowly, and once it was at forte, Hanno sounded the dissonant C-sharp that would lead back to the original key; and while the Stradivarius surged and dashed sonorously around the same C sharp, he used all his strength to crescendo the dissonance to fortissimo. He refused to resolve the chord, withheld it from himself and his audience. What would the resolution be like, this ravishing and liberating submersion into B major? Incomparable joy, the delight of sweet rapture. Peace, bliss, heaven itself. Not yet, not yet – one moment more of delay, of unbearable tension that would make the release all the more precious. He wanted one last taste of this insistent, urgent longing, of this craving that filled his whole being, of this cramped and strained exertion of will, which at the same time refused all fulfillment and release – he knew that happiness lasts only a moment. Hanno’s upper body slowly straightened up, his eyes grew large, his tightly closed lips quivered, he jerked back, drawing air in through his nose – and then that blessedness could be held back no longer. It came, swept over him, and he longer fought it. His muscles relaxed; overwhelmed he let his weary head sink back on his shoulders. His eyes closed, and a melancholy almost pained smile of unutterable ecstasy played about his mouth.
Is it any wonder Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and became the most renowned German author of the twentieth century? Thank you, Colm Tóibín, for reminding me of his extraordinary talent.
