The Buddenbrook clan is everything you'd expect of a nineteenth-century German family - wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth-century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the Buddenbrooks built their success. In this, Mann's first novel, his astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic, he portrays the transition of genteel Germanic stability to a very modern uncertainty.
This is an amazing read, detailing family life with all its troubles, wins , good moves and bad moves. I found it unputdownable.
Nothing major happens just family stuff, weddings, deaths, feasts but it flows and brings the four main characters to life.
If Middlemarch is 10/10 this is a solid 8. Mann wrote this at 25 years of age, a true feat.
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