Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Life Pereccalled “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future. Read an excerpt.

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Translate This Book!

Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating Life Perecread" by The New Yorker, Translate This Book! brings together over 40 of the top translators, publishers, and authors to tell us what books need to be published in English. Get it on Kindle.

Spring 2011 Group Read

Life Perec

Spring Read: Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Starting March 2011, read the greatest novel from an experimental master. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

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Interviews from Conversational Reading

New Books
See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.


Group Reads

Last Samurai

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A group read of one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

  • The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus March 5, 2012
    With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, an […]
  • War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann March 5, 2012
    Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler's troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn't clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. Thi […]
  • Us by Michael Kimball March 5, 2012
    Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as ac […]
  • The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb March 5, 2012
    Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation […]
  • The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky March 5, 2012
    The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and p […]
  • Zona by Geoff Dyer March 5, 2012
    Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a p […]
  • Remaking the Short Story: Four Untranslated Authors from Spain March 5, 2012
    Authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story have had a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inv […]
  • Dogma by Lars Iyer March 5, 2012
    A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iyer is the author of Spurious—which won The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” last year—and, now, Dogma, a sequel to the previous work. Both books are novels in name only—bookstores require these convenient taxonomies. In reality Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men […]
  • Mercè Rodoreda and the Style of Innocence March 5, 2012
    The Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez. Apart from two rec […]
  • The Clarice Lispector Roundtable March 5, 2012
    Barbara Epler: The whole Lispector re-launching began innocently enough: our plan had been to bring out a new edition of The Hour of the Star in the old Pontiero translation with an ardent Colm Tóibín preface. (With a backlist of our size—about 1,100 titles from 75 years of publishing—we are always trying to repackage classic backlist to reach more readers.) […]

Buddenbrooks: Concerning Death, etc.

Late in Buddenbrooks (p. 633 in the Woods translation), family patriarch Thomas has an epiphany while reading a casually acquired book:

He was filled with an unfamiliar sense of immense and grateful contentment.  He felt the incomparable satisfaction of watching an enormously superior intellect grab hold of life, of cruel, mocking, powerful life, in order to subdue and condemn it.  What he felt was the satisfaction of a sufferer who has always known only shame and the bite of conscience for hiding the suffering that cold, hard life brings, and who now, suddenly, from the hand of a great and wise man, receives elemental, formal justification for having felt such suffering in this world – in this best of all possible worlds, which by means of playful scorn was proved to be the worst of all possible worlds.

The chapter that triggers this recognition is entitled "Concerning Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Essential Nature," and it's part of a real book (although Mann gives no clues regarding its origin).  Specifically, it's a chapter of Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, the major expression of his thought. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes:

Among 19th century philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer was
among the first to contend that at its core, the universe is not a
rational place. Inspired by Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the
world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their
philosophies into an instinct-recognizing and ultimately ascetic
outlook, emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless
strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires to achieve a more
tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal
beneficence. Often considered to be a thoroughgoing pessimist,
Schopenhauer in fact advocated ways — via artistic, moral and
ascetic forms of awareness — to overcome a frustration-filled
and fundamentally painful human condition. Since his death in 1860,
his philosophy has had a special attraction for those who wonder about
life's meaning, along with those engaged in music, literature, and the
visual arts.

It's a major shock to witness this man, a model citizen and his generation's only real guardian of the Buddenbrook myth, fall under the spell of these ideas.  Mann keeps a poker face here, never drawing explicit connections between Thomas Buddenbrook's mental state and his family's many misfortunes, but the placement of the Schopenhauerian epiphany at the end of a long string of indignities leaves little doubt that events in the world have driven the head of the family to question his assumptions about life.

A hundred years later, in The Corrections, a novel likened to Buddenbrooks by a number of critics, Jonathan Franzen had his patriarch Alfred Lambert turn to Schopenhauer at a similarly low emotional ebb.  I assume this episode was meant to be an homage to the earlier book, but can't find confirmation – does anyone know?

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More from Conversational Reading:

  1. This Month, We’ll Be Reading Buddenbrooks Last spring I was completely blown away by Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. On the spot I vowed to read more Mann, and then didn't...
  2. Buddenbrooks: A Post-War and Peace Novel While we're reading Buddenbrooks, I think it will be useful to consider the book as a sort of work written in the tradition of War...
  3. Buddenbrooks: Which Translation? Katy at Love German Books asks which translation of Buddenbrooks we're reading. I don't know which Sacha and John are reading, so maybe they'll chime...
  4. Buddenbrooks: Why Woods? Like Scott, I’m reading the John E. Woods translation of Buddenbrooks.  I confess that my decision to read this particular translation was not the product...
  5. What’s at Stake in Buddenbrooks? As previously discussed, Buddenbrooks' subtitle makes clear that this is a book about the decline of a great family. So, an important question: Why should...

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