The sleeping book began its journey as a reading club in June 2003. His name refers to the need to rescue the values and principles that sleep within the books. The sleeping book It is defined as an entity created endless. Our action acquires the condition of cultural volunteering. Since 2012, corresponding to the school period, we impart the creative writing workshops on two levels: basic and advanced. Finally, the invitation to the authors to present their works or teach master classes on writing techniques has given rise to the creation of a literary forum where readers, books and writers converge, sharing ideas and concerns for culture.
Los Buddenbrook – Thomas Mann
EDHASA (Barcelona, 2008)
A novel, if as they like family sagas, do not scare the bumps or the parsimonious rhythm. The splendor and the decline of a powerful family of merchants of the German bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century is also the history of four decades of the country, through stereotyped characters that carry the ballast of rigid social conventions around its victories and personal failures.
With an autobiographical background, Thomas Mann It seems to release anguish and wounds through protagonists and secondary ones, which together with family housing are the basis of this wonderful novel where the fine irony is filtered in the predominant cult language in history.
The first thing is the first thing: dirty rags do not leave home. An thunderous silence about miseries and misfortunes predominates within this bourgeois family over four decades. From 1835 to 1876. Four generations pass through them, although the first one is intuited through the second and third, while the fourth is only outlined except in the case of little Hanno, the only son of Thomas Buddenbrok, the firstborn of his brothers: Tony, Christian and Clara.
Thomas and Tony are the powerful characters of the novel, while Christian is in the background and clear is practically an unimportant mention. Thomas represents all those primary values of the time: seriousness, a staunch defense of the last name that was quoted in the past (until the debacle arrives), embodies the neat bourgeois that follows the pattern established for those of its class. The duty before pleasure is its mantra, to such an extreme, that it becomes the spirit that travels between the cusp of the Buddenbrok empire and its decline.
Its exquisite is a perfectly defended bastion with the elegant and quiet prose, dyed of that cultured language that runs through the novel. Although Tony is also with him, in that supine effort for the appearance for the public, we will have the opportunity to know that in every house beans.
Without a doubt, it is the character that I liked the most. Although, as a woman has to Fulfilling its function – letting yourself with a family, if possible with good alliances to keep the family pavilion very high – its rebel and unfortunate character gives off a special charm. His two failed marriages, thanks to two husbands – each more extravagant and mediocre – takes her along a unfortunate path of which he will not tire of complaining. He is a drama queen professional.
He bores so much regret and. However, it is funny in its own way. Being another hypocritical in the Buddenbrook universe, it does not reach the level of signing of his older brother. It is not difficult for him to face the firstborn and use his tongue to spit the poison he keeps in the stomach. Of course, facing the gallery, you have to be quiet.
Brother Christian brings to the whole the stereotype of the family skull. A black chickpea that appears and disappears, while the fourth, Clara goes practically unnoticed in the novel, because the poor man, in addition to dying young, seems to disregard the last name and her ínfulas.
The boy Hanno, son of the older brother, is a moving character. In it all hopes are deposited so that the cache of the last name does not ship and yet none is fulfilled. He is a little sick, hypersensitive and in love with music. We will see you suffer, in addition to your sensitivity, for your inability to meet expectations. It hurts the cruelty that is exercised on him, especially in the school environment. It is one of those characters, which thanks to the author’s ability, creates an image in your brain immediately. Ojeroso, pale and weakened, like his spirit. The time asks for courage, stoicism, zero fuss and rejection of any sample of sensitivity. In this world, the child is lost. It is fantastic how the writer transmits the anguish of the huge well in which he lives. He was born in a world without a place for him.
Detailed descriptions of Mannnot only for Hanno, but for the rest, as well as the family home, furniture, clothing and a long etcetera, they are a constant throughout the novel. Although, it is true that they are excessive, they help to place you at all times and place.
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They are precisely that long list of details and details, which contribute to the slowness in the rhythm of history. But, there is no action. That is not the objective of almost 900 pages, but the accompaniment to the family in its day to day, in its interior storms, in the evolution experienced by the last name as the years go by.
The consolidated (supposedly) estates, the inability of Thomas and Tony to see and manage that reality that “everything has its end”, the rigidity and scrupulousness in compliance with social norms, makes the fall of the Buddenbrook lineage even more dramatic, which due to its historical context, follows the same descending route that will experience bourgeois class, with its characteristic class, with its characteristic “I want and I can not
His classist vision of a world that is exhausted turns out to be a hecatombe that the reader understands once he has dived in the mind and context of the characters, so well illustrated by Mann in this work with which he obtained the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. It is clear that he knew the universe created in Los Buddenbrook Since it came from a wealthy merchant family, also from Lübeck, where the novel is set.
