Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann · 1901 CE · Novel · German · Modernist

Four generations of a Lubeck grain family hold a firm, a great house on the Mengstrasse and a seat at the head of the town, and each generation proves a little less fit to keep them. Marriages are arranged for the ledger, a daughter is spent twice on bad matches, and the last son would rather sit at the harmonium. Mann was twenty-five when he finished it, and the Nobel citation named this book specifically.

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