I made a reasonable effort to read Buddenbrooks, but did not enjoy it at all, and, under my existing policy of not finishing books that I dislike, I simply stopped reading it. I'll just explain my thinking process a little. The writing is realistic and describes in detail the conversations and activities of the characters. Though I didn't get very far into it, it takes a long-term look at the evolution of a bourgeois family in Germany, from 1835 to 1877, covering four generations. Unlike most novels, this one describes a process of decline. The main problems that I have with it are that I am unlikely to identify at all with any of the characters, except possibly near the end, and that, although Mann is relatively intellectual for a novelist, I share none of his interest in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Wagner. Schopenhauer died the year following the publication of On the Origin of Species, and, consequentially, his ideas sound like philosophical gobbledygook to me. It is possible that I would have appreciated a novel like this if it had been written few decades later, after Darwinism was established, but, in its current form, it seems completely anachronistic. I might add that Mann was a contemporary of Proust, whom I also dislike, but for different reasons. Both Buddenbrooks and In Search of Lost Time are mainly about the bourgeoisie as observed during their lives, which included the Belle Époque in Europe and partially coincided with the Gilded Age in the U.S. Unlike Mann, Proust revels in bourgeois life uncritically and is oblivious to character analysis and perhaps the ephemeral nature of social trends. While they each have their strengths as writers, unless you confine them to their environments and times, they have little to say to me compared to, for example, George Eliot. Under these circumstances, I'm reverting to biographies again. I am starting on How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell, which looks promising.
Since my last post, we've moved from mid-fall to late-fall. The colors are darkening but are still pretty. On Tuesday I made a road trip to Tamworth, New Hampshire to visit the younger brother of a friend whom I had tried to locate. I hadn't seen that friend since 1971, when he was returning from a geological summer in Utah. In my mind, I thought that he would have had a good life, because he had graduated from Andover and Oberlin College and became a geologist. I was surprised to learn that he had become a pothead and was generally unemployable. He was living alone in Ludlow, Vermont, not far from where I live, and died in his sleep five years ago from a heart attack. If I had known his whereabouts I would have visited him. His family is somewhat interesting. His father and grandfather were both MDs, and his grandfather served as a missionary helping the Inuit in Alaska. His sister was a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Pomona College. The brother whom I visited is more of an outdoorsman. He lives with his wife in a former camp on fifty acres. The town of Tamworth seemed closely-knit, and everyone downtown seemed to know everyone else – they all seemed friendly. The brother makes canoes and furniture and does a lot of canoeing himself. There seems to have been a wide variety of outcomes for the Baby Boomers I knew. While some may now seem self-centered or narcissistic, others were drug abusers or, if they were drafted, suffered from PTSD. I don't mind refraining from looking up people from my past. At present, several high school and college friends have died. Two of my ex-girlfriends have died, and my ex-wife has stage 4 cancer. This may sound rather grim, but yesterday I reminded my daughter that, until recently, women generally had six or seven children and died by about the age of thirty. I currently seem to be in fairly good health and may live quite a lot longer.
I'm still attempting not to bore readers with political talk. I actually hate it myself, and, as in 2024, I'm being barraged with stupid political messages and am wasting time deleting them from my phone. At present, my incoming emails are more under control. It's actually embarrassing to wait for the election results: this resembles Groundhog Day. Will voters go outside and see a MAGA hat or an "I'm a Talafreako" T-shirt? It is somewhat easier for me to handle politics through The Contrarian, where Norm Eisen is succeeding just by using conventional legal processes.
’m sorry you gave up on *The Buddenbrooks*, though I don’t consider it his most significant work either. His short stories might be easier to read. A film is also coming out soon about Mann’s return to Germany after the war—for many of his readers, this is actually the central theme, though it’s clear that Americans don’t have much interest in it. As for Proust, the oversight—in not reading him—is far greater. The book is incredibly vast; it demands a great deal of time and total immersion in a work that functions as a veritable encyclopedia. It is certainly not a book about the bourgeoisie—much like Mann’s works, which are really about the collapse of German culture rather than the decline of a single family or person (In Doctor Faustus). Proust is a very modern writer, which means—though it may not be immediately obvious—that he depicted and astutely observed an entire society: from cooks and coachmen to high-caliber artists and prostitutes (including male sex workers), and, of course, how such figures—prostitutes and liars—can eventually ascend to become the social elite. He also writes extensively about human callousness, love, war, and, naturally, the transience of life—themes that, I believe, resonate with everyone.
ReplyDeleteI was attempting to read European literature that I had never been exposed to. It is possible that, as you say, Mann has written better fiction. However, I did start on Proust a long time ago, but got too bored and gave up by the time I reached "The Guermantes Way." Within that range, I did not find Proust very insightful: he seemed to be recording events around him without thinking about them much or analyzing them. To me, Madame Verdurin was a classic bourgeoisie, as was Charles Swann. Within these volumes, I did not see Proust engaging in what I would consider to be social criticism. I noted with interest a few years later that, in "The Mandarins," Simone de Beauvoir absolutely detested salons like Madame Verdurin's. I think that Proust did inhabit a very rich culture, but, in my reading, he was not particularly thoughtful about it. In any case, I'm pretty tired of fiction at this point and may restrict myself to shorter works, especially since they don't take much time to read.
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