Recommendations
Books Like Buddenbrooks
What to read after Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901) is one of the great family sagas in world literature — four generations of a north German merchant family, from prosperity in 1835 to extinction in 1877, observed with the precision of an early Mann who is also already interested in the metaphysics of decline. The novel that earned Mann the Nobel Prize. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Forsyte Saga
by John Galsworthy
The English companion to Buddenbrooks — Soames Forsyte and the Forsyte family across three generations; Mann and Galsworthy were contemporaries and both were writing family sagas about the same historical moment (the transition from Victorian/Wilhelmine prosperity to Edwardian/Weimar decline); the two together give you the same theme from the English and German perspectives simultaneously
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
Seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo — the twentieth-century family saga that most directly belongs to the tradition Buddenbrooks belongs to; where Mann traces a family's decline over four generations with naturalistic precision, García Márquez traces it over seven with magical realism; both end in the family's extinction and both are about the inability of any family dynasty to survive intact across generations
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The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
Hans Castorp's seven years in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium — Mann's major novel of ideas and the companion to Buddenbrooks in his work; where Buddenbrooks is a naturalistic family chronicle, The Magic Mountain is a novel of competing ideological positions; the natural second Mann for readers who want to go further, though significantly more demanding
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart's destruction by Gilded Age New York — the American novel of the same period (Wharton published in 1905, four years after Buddenbrooks) most directly about the same subject: the social world that was formed by nineteenth-century prosperity and that is destroying itself through its own values in the twentieth century
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The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Oskar Matzerath, who decides at age three not to grow up, and the history of Danzig from 1899 to 1954 — the major German novel of the twentieth century and the heir to Buddenbrooks in German literary fiction; where Mann traces the decline of a north German family with naturalistic precision, Grass traces the decline of Danzig with surrealist exuberance; both are about the same north German world across different centuries
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Effi Briest
by Theodor Fontane
Effi von Briest in Prussian society — the other great German novel of the same period; published six years before Buddenbrooks, in 1895, and the major predecessor to Mann's work in the German realist tradition; Thomas Mann called Effi Briest one of the six greatest novels ever written; reading it alongside Buddenbrooks shows the full landscape of German realism at the end of the nineteenth century
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The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov
The Ranevskaya family and the sale of their cherry orchard — Chekhov's last play (1904) is the Russian companion to Buddenbrooks in the literature of aristocratic and bourgeois decline; where Mann traces the Buddenbrook decline in exhaustive novelistic detail, Chekhov captures the same theme in a two-hour play; both are about a family that cannot adapt to the world that is replacing them and that is in some way complicit in their own extinction
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Ivan Ilyich, a judge who has spent his life pursuing respectability and who dies realizing he has never lived — Tolstoy's novella is the condensed version of the theme Buddenbrooks explores at length: the bourgeois life that looks correct from the outside and is hollow inside; where Mann needs 700 pages to show the Buddenbrook decline, Tolstoy needs 80 pages to show the same hollowness in a single character
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