Mann: Buddenbrooks (1901)

Buddenbrooks is often described as one of the last great realist novels, as well as one of the first great novels of the twentieth century. In its scope and ambition, it’s worthy of both plaudits, and is even more extraordinary in that it was written when Thomas Mann was a mere twenty-six. Like so many realist novels, it’s a family saga, revolving around the decline of a Hanseatic merchant family based on Mann’s own, although if anything that seems to caution him from descending into sentimentality, or compensating with excessive, objective detachment. Instead, the whole novel is punctuated by an awry, abrupt, slightly staccato movement from one episode to another, as if to capture the gradual dissolution and fragmentation of the family in the very midst of their struggles to constitute themselves as a single, continuous narrative. That might seem to preclude the seriality of the classic realist novel, except that Mann perfects something close to the ‘cold opens’ of contemporary televisual and serial attachment. Nearly always, his chapters start by plunging us into an event or episode that only becomes clear as it progresses, and often feels quite dissonant with the previous chapter, even or especially when it leads directly on from it. That prevents the novel ever feeling too grandiose, allowing it to expand and contract between the broad sweep of the family and Mann’s Wagnerian leitmotifs with a syncopated rhythm that lends a slight touch of bemused paradox to every moment of epic decline – the decline that Tonie Buddenbrooks, one of the most enduring characters, clings to as the last emblem and symbol of her family pride. Often, too, Mann will follow a extensive, intricate description with a minute event or incident that doesn’t undermine it so much as open up a slightly different sense of duration, a rupture in the family’s (and the novel’s) exquisitely bourgeois demarcation of time and space. For that reason, it often feels like a realist novel with a modernist sense of time, or at least a realist novel that is experimenting with a modernist sense of time. And it takes the most chiselled, assured prose style to keep some six hundred pages poised at that precarious cusp, as well as the most startling audacity to gradually centripete such comfortable, homely tableaux out into the minutely modulated entropy and discontinuity with which they conclude. In many other realist novels, you can be sure that everyone you meet will return again in some way, if only as a presence, or a brooding significance, but that’s not the case here. Everything spirals outwards, refusing to allow its import to remain for any length of time, until you feel as if the entire novel has somehow escaped you, just as the Buddenbrooks’ decline escapes the full consciousness of any one family member, let alone any family member who might want to think of themselves as its main character.