buddenbrooks – decline of a family

This is a long family saga, set in the North German town of Lubeck. Lübeck was one of the Hanseatic League, an alliance of trading cities and states along the north coats of Europe that established and maintained trade monopoly along the coast of Northern Europe and had their own law.

The book follows four generations of a mercantile family, the Buddenbrooks.  At the beginning of the book, the family is at the height of its power – the patriarch of the family has a thriving business, two sons who will follow him into the business and a beautiful daughter, he is a member of the Town Senate and a highly respected and wealthy man. But as as the subtitle suggests, the family’s fortunes are waning, and by the end of the book, only a rump of the family remains, 5 old women sitting the twilight with no money, no status, and only their memories to keep them warm. In between are disastrous marriages, love affairs, bad business deals, building projects, good marriages, children, and a relentless progression of others’ fortunes that eclipse the Buddenbrooks’ status and wealth. You can read a full description of the book in Wikipedia.

So why does the family decline? It seems that the Buddenbrooks get too indulgent and soft – they don’t have the mongrel streak of hard work in them that their ancestors did. They don’t want success badly enough. And yet they are still propelled by a strong sense of duty towards the family firm and the Buddenbrook name, even as the firm begins to go downhill and the name loses status. At the same time, the younger Buddenbrooks are yearning for something more, something to do with art and higher culture rather than buying and selling commodities.  This tensions hampers their ability to cope, as they remain obsessed with status and but unable to maintain it, less able to arrest their decline, a circle which feeds itself.

Despite the action taking place at a time of great social change in Germany and wider Europe, external affairs almost never show up in the book. There is no mention of revolution, Bismarck, the formation of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire, or anything else that was going on in the period 1835 to 1875. This heightens the obsession of the Buddenbrooks with their own little world in Lübeck and shows that they are fast becoming relics of an older time.

It’s interesting to compare this book to The Forsyte Saga, another book about a family that declines at a time of great social change because the younger generations lack the moral fibre of the older. The Forsyte Saga seems more concerned with the idea that nineteenth century Englishness, the sort that built the empire, declined after the Edwardian period and would never recover. Buddenbrooks is perhaps looking for a slightly more scientific and philosophical explanation.

One thing that I really liked about the book was how well Thomas Mann develops the characters. The third generation of Buddenbrooks, Thomas, Toni and Christian, genuinely grow and change from childhood to adulthood, but retain certain markers from childhood into adulthood. Not many authors manage to do that realistically. My sympathies for these characters changed over the course of the book.

Thomas Mann also uses some slightly odd motifs as symbols of different characters. One of these is teeth. He will note the strong white teeth of the older generation and of the other merchant families of the town (and the common people) who begin to eclipse the Buddenbrooks, while the last generation of Buddenbrooks, Thomas’s son Hanno, is in constant pain from rotting and fragile teeth. It is a visit to the dentist that kills off Thomas Buddenbrook in the end.

Mann also inserts a lot of variety into the book by varying the time span and length of the chapters. This is very effective in conveying both the mood of the characters and of the times. For example, when Thomas Buddenbrook suspects his wife is having an affair, a long chapter covers a single afternoon that he spends alternately listening at the door of a room as she entertains a visitor, and sneaking away to his study to fume and broods. In contrast in other places he will skip over several weeks, months or even years, in a few pages, using a distant passive voice, which creates the impression of looking at the family from a long distance away.

One last thing that struck me: This book is very much a 19^th century book, in style, setting, and content. It was first published in 1901. Thomas Mann died in 1955. The social changes that he would have seen in his lifetime, especially in Germany, would have been phenomenal. He survived, it seems, much better than the Buddenbrooks. Perhaps because, as he said in accepting the Nobel Prize, “The value and significance of my work for posterity may safely be left to the future; for me they are nothing but the personal traces of a life led consciously, that is, conscientiously.”

Buddenbrooks is a long book, but well worth reading, especially if you like 19th century novels and/or family sagas.  I enjoyed it very much.

Buddenbrooks: decline of a family
Thomas Mann
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

death and disillusionment

The Great Gatsby and Appointment in Samarra

I’m reviewing these two books together because they are of similar age and cover similar themes.  Both are set between the wars, both are, in some sense, classic tragedies – featuring flawed heroes who must die because of their flaws; and both deal with the disillusion of societies captive to wealth and status.

(Full plot of The Great Gatsby)
(Full plot of Appointment in Samarra)

From the beginning of both books, it’s obvious the heroes are doomed.  Gatsby, because the narrator makes it plain that this is an obituary; and Julian English (the hero of Appointment in Samarra) from the book’s title, which comes from an epigram by Walter de la Mare.  Both of them seem at once responsible for the circumstances around their downfalls, yet powerless to stop. Gatsby has been pursuing a beautiful rich girl, by trying to turn himself into someone else, and he can’t stop.  Julian’s seemingly impulsive and minor acts have larger and graver consequences than he, thoughtless and shallow, can imagine.

Both are wealthy men, though Julian inherited his wealth whereas Gatsby acquired his by dubious means never quite explained.  Both are popular on the wild party circuit in their respective towns where, despite Prohibition, the booze flows liberally and everyone gets very, very drunk, a lot.  But Neither Julian nor Gatsby really know who they are.  Gatsby inhabits a made-up character that he has created for himself, to the extent that he’s lost the self that his girl Daisy loved in the first place.  And Julian has never really had to be responsible for his actions, to the extent that he doesn’t realise what image he projects and what the consequences of his immaturity will be.

Both books use cars as metaphors and important plot devices.  Cars are used to show the type of person being described (flashy, sensible, poor, old-money, new-money, gangster); and also the person’s state of mind (driving slowly, quickly, recklessly, erratically, sensibly, mindlessly).  Cars are also instruments of death.  I guess most of this comes from the time the books are set, when car ownership was becoming middle-class, and associated anxieties about technology and pace of change were beginning to make themselves felt.

There are two main differences between these books.  The Great Gatsby is written in the first person, so the narrative is very tight and controlled.  This adds to the mystery around Gatsby – we can only ever know as much about Gatsby as the narrator does.  Appointment in Samarra is written in the third person, and often uses peripheral characters’ viewpoints to show what is happening to Julian.  This is quite effective, because much of his downfall is not just due to his own behaviour, but also to the gossip and rumour that begins to swirl around him.  The three incidents of bad behaviour that trigger the chain of events are not even seen by the reader, they are read about afterwards.

The second difference is the time they are set.  The Great Gatsby is set in the 1920′s before the stock market crash.  The money and the good times look like they’ll go on forever, making Gatsby’s death seem more tragic than perhaps it really should be.  Appointment in Samarra is set not long after the crash, when the Great Depression is beginning to be felt.  The book uses quite a few example of people and businesses that were overly extravagent in the good times and are now sliding towards the bottom – Julian is just one of these.  Julian and Gatsby are about half a generation apart:  Gatsby is old enough to have fought in WWI, Julian was just too young and with the rest of his peer group feels separated and immature next to the veterans.  The Great Gatsby seems to be a warning of the coming hangover that will be explored in Appointment in Samarra.

Ultimately, The Great Gatsby is the better book.  F.Scott Fitzgerald is a master – there is not one superfluous word in the whole story, and every incident and every piece of landscape is there for a reason.  He can conjure up states of  mind and characters in just a few words, like this, which has everything you need to know about a turning-thirty crisis in one compact line:

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

John O’Hara is trying a bit harder to shock (for its time, the book is explicit), and he needs many more words and pages and anecdotes to draw his characters.  Not that he does it badly, they are powerfully observed and very enjoyable to read.

I’ve not come across O’Hara before, and I’m keen to seek out more of his books (apparently one of them,  BUttercup8 was banned in Australia till the mid-sixties).  I first read The Great Gatsby over 10 years ago, when going through an extended F.Scott Fiztgerald phase, and I now know I didn’t really get it the first time round.  Both books are highly recommended, and if you buy the latest Penguin edition of The Great Gatsby (with the retro orange cover) it includes an interesting essay on the book which is also well worth a read.

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fiztgerald
Penguin Books

Appointment in Samarra
John O’Hara
Vintage / Random House
(I got mine at Fly-By-Night Books for a ridiculously low price)

the kreutzer sonata

Penguin Books seem to be packaging and repackaging their back catalogue in as many permutations and combinations as they can.  The Kreutzer Sonata is one from Penguin’s Great Loves series, but it’s more a story of hatred and despair than  love.  The narrator meets a man on a train, a man who becomes increasingly agitated as the conversation turns to love and marriage.  As the train runs on through the night and the other passengers fall asleep, the man reveals the source of his agitation: he killed his wife when he found out she was unfaithful.

However, this is not just a tale of simple jealousy.  Long before the wife was unfaithful, the marriage was going badly, and the murderous husband blames all of this on sex.  Sex, he believes, is ‘swinish’, a degrading animality that civilised people should avoid.  Marriage should not be be based on carnal desire, true love would not involve sex at all, and so long as men view women as objects of desire, they cannot help but to degrade and oppress women. All this can only lead to one end: jealousy, murder, violence and suffering.

Are you still with me?  All this is not as depressing and outrageous to read as it sounds.  The Kreutzer Sonata of the title refers to a Beethoven violin sonata: watching his wife play this piece with her lover, the husband realises by the way the music is affecting her, that his suspicions about her infidelity are true.  The first movement of this sonata is an angry and unrelenting piece of music, emotionally exhausting, much as the narrator must have felt after listening to the story. Much like a piece of Beethoven’s music, idea after idea is brought forward in an unrelenting stream, with the full picture gradually emerging in a violent and exhilarating crescendo.

It can’t be easy to write the rantings of a madman is a way that is coherent and focused, but every crazy argument is completely consistent with the character, and seems, scarily, to make perfect sense. Tolstoy is a brilliant writer, and he builds the story up to a crescendo without a bum note, keeping the narrative taut to the very end.

Tolstoy became deeply religious in later life, and advocated chastity and abstinence, among other things, as being essential to leading a committed Christian life.  He wrote “”The Christian’s ideal is love of God and his neighbour, self-renunciation in order to serve God and his neighbour; carnal love, marriage, means serving oneself, and therefore is, in any case, a hindrance in the service of God and men”. The book was banned in Russia almost as soon as it was published, and later in the US as well.

Despite Tolstoy’s ideas on women, sex and love being almost entirely opposite to my own, I really enjoyed this book.  It’s so intense that sometimes I had to stop reading, but I was compelled to dive straight in again to find out what happened next.  If you’ve never read any Tolstoy and are put off by the length of War and Peace or Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata is a great introduction and a great read.

The Kreutzer Sonata
Leo Tolstoy
Penguin