Thomas Mann
I very readable book charting the decline of a merchant family based in a middling German sea town. Great descriptive writing and character development a bit like Dickens with similarly fatalistic themes. It starts with the successes of the family and how two brothers grow up - one heading up the firm completely obsessed with position in society and the other a wanderer more inclined to satisfy his own needs and to worry about his mostly imagined ailments. Their sister sits between the two and having glimpsed true love and happiness with a radical from a lower class is bullied by her parents and older brother into an unhappy marriage for status which turns out to be based on a sham anyway. Things just get worse for her and although I felt the most sympathy with this character and put her decisions down to societal pressures on women at that time by the end of the book she is seen as as bad as the rest. The elder brother has a brief fling for love which both know must end and then marries having a seemingly satisfactory life. The younger brother has wild dalliances ending up married and then abused.
The latter part follows the only son of the merchant and his ill health and love of music rather than commerce. A disappointment to the father who he rebels against in a withdrawn way rather than fighting out. His future seems both precarious and unlikely with a fitting and perhaps predictable conclusion to the book.
Early on in the book the revolutions of 1848 are touched upon with some humour although looking from a different angle it shows the arrogance and authority held by the merchant ruling class who have only just ousted the landed gentry from power. These class themes run through the book alongside the analogy of the fate of the family in much the same way that Dickens' stories do. There is humour here in the way that family members act although, again, not as sharp as Dickens but maybe there is something lost in translation despite the obvious work by the translator to bring what I assume are German word plays into English.
Overall I came away not really liking any of the characters and maybe that's the effect meant when written around 1900 that the merchant class will fade away due to interbreeding, self loathing and lax morals. The catastrophes of wars around this time culminating in WWI and the rise of American capitalist dominance in later years changed what I think Mann was expecting of the bourgeoisie position in society but still an interesting history of the individuals building up German trade at that time.
