Isabel García Adánez has found a precise voice for Thomas Mann in Spanish. The success of his magnificent translation in 2005 of The Magic Mountain was overwhelming: reports and praiseworthy reviews in all the media, the Quixote Prize for Best Translation of the year and the novel, after so many years, placed back on the lists of the best sellers Now, with the publication of The Buddenbrooks, Edhasa continues his mission to recover Thomas Mann and offer the reader the final editions of his work.
When Thomas Mann was only 25 years old when he decided to follow the advice of his editor and move from the stories to write a novel. So he explained it to Otto Grautoff in a letter:
"Fischer has repeatedly expressed in his letters the desire to publish a major work of mine in prose, a book that could market it better than a volume of stories, I had not believed until now that I would have the courage to start a business like that. But, almost suddenly, I have discovered a subject, I have taken a resolution and I am thinking of starting with writing. "
They say that Fischer despaired when he saw that the novel in question had more than 900 pages, which would oblige him to publish it in two volumes, which seemed even less commercial than the stories! Of course, Thomas Mann refused to cut a single line, and the rest is already History of Universal Literature: more than 6 million copies sold in German, translations into more than thirty languages. When in 1929 he awarded Thomas Mann the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy claimed that it was "mainly for his great novel, The Buddenbrooks, which has conquered a growing recognition as one of the great classical works of contemporary literature" . It is undoubtedly one of the most important works of literature of the twentieth century.
The city of Lübeck and his own family inspired Thomas Mann to write this extraordinary family saga that spans four generations and a temporary space between 1835 and 1877. In it he not only traces a gigantic fresco of an era and a society, but also deep portrait of human nature: winners and losers, brave and cowardly, fortunate and miserable, rich and poor.