`I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavours. Where might I be, if I were not here?`
Buddenbrooks is one of the original, and greatest, of family chronicles: the story of four generations of a wealthy and bourgeois German family as they experience all the anguish and rewards of human life: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, madness, bankruptcy and artistic achievement. Richly realized and profoundly moving, Thomas Mann`s first great novel was published when he was only twenty-five, and was one of the two books for which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.
John E. Woods` elegant translation is widely acclaimed as the best available English version.
