BUDDENBROOKS; DEATH IN VENICE by Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann died in Zürich, Switzerland on this day in 1955, at the age of 80.


“...when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us” 

“The Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse did not weep, however - it was not their custom. Their faces, a little less caustic than usual at least, expressed a gentle satisfaction at death's impartiality.”
―from BUDDENBROOKS

BUDDENBROOKS, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature. It is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate. As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor. In its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, BUDDENBROOKS surpasses all other modern family chronicles. With remarkable fidelity to the original German text, this superb translation emphasizes the magnificent scale of Mann’s achievement in this riveting, tragic novel. With an introduction by T. J. Reed, and translated by John E. Woods. MORE here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/…/107…/buddenbrooks/9780679417378/

"The happiness of writers is the thought that can be entirely
emotion and the emotion that can be entirely thought. Such a pulsing thought, such a precise emotion belonged to the solitary one then: namely that nature was shaken with delight when the mind paid homage to beauty."
--from DEATH IN VENICE by Thomas Mann

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom. In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is the story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."