The Thomas Mann Collection: Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and Death in Venice

By: Thomas Mann

Narrated by: Peter Noble

Length: 70 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

The Thomas Mann Collection includes unabridged recordings of Thomas Mann's 3 greatest works of fiction in one audiobook.

This audiobook is fully indexed. Once downloaded, each book and chapter will be listed so you can easily navigate to the individual section.

The titles included here are:

The Magic Mountain - In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality.

Buddenbrooks - The story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate.

Death in Venice - Tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

Public Domain (P)2023 SNR Audio

Critic reviews

"It is impossible to talk seriously about the fate of Germany in the twentieth century without reference to Thomas Mann." (New Yorker)

Well worth your credit!

All of the books in this collection are, of course, already German classics and need no recommendation. The narration of such long and complex books can however fail the books and put the reader off. Not so in this case! Each novel comes alive and is vital. Peter Noble deserves congratulations, not just for such a massive task, but for a performance so well done! Excellent narration! Well worth a listen!

A little disappointing

I read Magic Mountain once, and quite liked it. But this time, I found it too long, with too much philosophising, although most of the book is worth reading. The reader, Peter Noble, is perfect, though: you couldn’t wish for a better one.

Performance

Absolutely excellent reader and interpretation of the 3 so different books- preserving soul of German in a perfect English

What a slog!

I bought this package of books because of its value and my thinking that I should finally in my seventies see why Mann is highly regarded. Buddenbrooks was not bad - sort of a long German Magnificent Ambersons but with less interesting characters and plot. The Magic Mountain, however, was hands-down the longest, most boring waste of time I have ever read - endless didactic palaver about philosophy listened to by a horrendously dull central character who does nothing but sit in a sanitorium for seven years while he pines for a woman patient he barely met and listens to the pedagogues. His slight fever is "treated" by doctors who seem to be predatory quacks. Death in Venice was mercifully short but is simply a creepy tale about on older man's homosexual attraction to a 14-year-old. When a plague hits Venice, the boy and his family leave without having had any real encounter with the man, and the man dies of the plague. Thank goodness for a good narrator; I'd never have finished the Mountain without the convenience of listening to it while walking my dog.