Buddenbrooks, the decline of a family

I read this author's book The Magic Mountain when I was in high school and liked it pretty well, though it was maybe over my head then. What I remember from that was the well-drawn characters, each one distinct, the long discussions about the world and about art, and the way it ended with the outbreak of fighting during the first World War. This earlier book was instead the kind of family saga like the one I finished recently which shows the main characters during youth, maturity, and old age in a way that says something about the family as a whole by the end. The setting in northern Germany for the most part was much wider than the other book, with a number of different dwelling places reflecting the changing fortunes of the family along with some scnees from the workplaces and schools. They are both big fat books that require the attention of a reader over a considerable stretch of time, just the kind of ambitious reading material well-suited while we are still in lockdown for the most part and can take some time to immerse ourselves in a different setting.

I really enjoyed the way the author could come up with a way to make each of the featured characters interesting, even the ones who come across as mostly unsympathetic, switching from one to the next in successive chapters along with some ensemble pieces at family gatherings and in the political arena. There was no single challenge that everyone faced, but most of the Buddenbrooks family members had to come up with the conflict between whether to put personal wishes first versus the good of the family and its status in society. As soon as you see the subtitle, you know that it's going to be a downward course, and seeing just how the individual choices all conspired to bring the mighty family low by the end feels to me like a monumental feat to pull off. The early chapters covered a time when the memory of the Napoleonic Wars was still fresh, and by the end two generations later the backdrop is of a different conflict, the Franco-Prussian War. The decline in the Buddenbrooks family fortune came from a series of mistakes, not a single mishap: losing to the competition in business, bad marriages by the daughter Tony Buddenbrook which sought to siphon off funds, members seeking to pull their inheritance out of the family coffers prematurely and squandering their opportunities, and the overly ambitious purchase of an expensive house for the sake of appearance which turned not to be sustainable. At the same time there were unexpected deaths which took away possibilities of pulling their fortunes upward. The family trade never changed over a hundred years including the time of this novel, which seemed prudent at the beginning but might have kept them from going on to other opportunities to succeed somewhere else. By the end I felt like everyone was culpable and at the same time no one was wrong, if you can see what clues they had to go by, which gives the whole business a tragic feeling. The author also injects a healthy awareness of things the characters could consider more important than the money and status, whether it is music or love or philosophy, and yet these also fall by the wayside leaving them mostly unsatisfied. I am impressed how this was written when the author was still young, benefiting from the ability to look back to his own family history and recollections of this part of Germany. A couple of times I thought about the comparison to the work of Proust, another massive book from the early part of the twentieth century, and I think there were some interesting parallels, especially in the sections about music in each.

The audiobook narration is just superb. I could make out the voices of the different characters without too much trouble, without the sense that it was going too much into caricature, and at the moments of high drama the reading really conveyed the emotional aspect of what was going on too. The performance in English translation was over twenty-five hours in all but didn't feel like a burden over the month I spent listening.