Great Expectations would be my title for this review. At the outset it looks like one of those long drawn out family sagas with stodgy upperclass mores and lots of characters, but this novel is better than anything Dickens or Austen or their kind wrote and you should read it even if you don't like those types of books.

Although the rich detail the author uses paints scenes where you can smell the coffee, sea air, or taste the dessert,it is better than that because there is not a simple morality at play that attributes success or failure. Why does this family decline? It's not simply greed or sloth or profligacy or turning away from God or family. No the childlike morality of some the characters is contrasted with the author's skepticism and philosophical bent. There is a randomness to the fail, it is not like Gibbons decline and fall where you can point to specific reasons.

I can see why Europe in early 1929 felt a connection to this 1901 book that spans from 1835 - 1877. The headlines said boom times still, but more and more people were not participating in it - this is what happens to the firm and the family Buddenbrooks. Success seems random. the successful aren't much different than the muddle-rs. Pessimism spreads. Unlike the 20th Century, there's no catastrophic event, just the combination of the fatal flaws of the all the characters adds up.

Yet this book wouldn't win the Swedish award now. If you look at it as Mann won the Prize on this novel, I don't think it meets expectations. Magic Mountain is better. I haven't gotten to Dr Faustus. But the main issue is that the Schopenhauer and Wagnerian influences do not permeate or interweave through out. They are presented in essays towards the end. It's too forced. Moreover the pessimism is unwarranted in hindsight. Germany is more powerful today than 1901 or 1929 thanks to the EU. Ironically those custom unions which the author frowns upon were what led to the EU. If the decline was about moral decline maybe you could make an argument that we are worse off now, but the focus of the novel measures decline in money, prestige, and male heirs.

I found the last male heir to be the most humane, beautiful and endearing. Maybe in that way one lives on past their life - an idea presented at the end of the novel. His death is the real tragedy, everything is else either the breaks or comeuppance.

The Woods translation gives you an idea that Mann also did a lot with the use of dialect that is hard to translate. I'm going to seek out other Mann books by this translator, since I will most likely never learn German.