A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great
novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in
1929.
Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only
twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four
generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate
skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and
christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These
commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in
each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs
to the