Thread: Literary Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
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Old 07-22-2013, 03:18 PM   #31
Hamlet53
Nameless Being
 
So having completed Parts I through IV I have a few in progress comments relative to the discussion so far.

First kudos to Issybird for her apt comparison of this book to The Forsyte Saga. I would say that the latter, as far as my memory goes, did seem to move a little more briskly than I am finding Buddenbrooks to. Though I would never characterize either as a “page turner.”


I am reading the Thomas translation, and while this is my first and only read of Buddenbrooks so I can't compare to the alternate Lowe-Porter translation, nothing leaps out at me to suggest that I am gaining or losing anything by my choice. It is true that it strikes me as comic that a word like ain't would come out of the mouth of a mid-19th Century German, I still get the intended meaning.

The discussion of how and why Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize is very interesting. Having set myself the task of reading something by every Nobel Prize for Literature winner, and with the intent to get what may be the hard stuff (both hard to read and hard to get from my local library) out of the way first I have been working forward in years from the year the first prize was awarded. My own opinion is that while there were a couple of the authors that received the prize prior to WWI whose books still stand up for the most part I would say that the criteria for receiving such a supposedly prestigious award have changed, become more exacting, over the years.
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