BUDDENBROOKS

　　A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of ThomasMann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awardedthe Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. Buddenbrooks, firstpublished in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, hasbecome a classic of modem literature -- the story of fourgenerations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. Withconsummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-classlife: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths;successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences,intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in eachsucceeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventuallysuccumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are atvariance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain.In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness ofhumanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family chronicles;it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as thegreatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it is ranked as amongthe greatest by all. Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize forliterature in 1929. "From the Hardcover edition."