Regarding them Traverses...

[Mark Kohut]

I have always felt---little evidence and haven't tried to find any---that
the family decline
of the Traverses as worked out in Against the Day, was inspired by the
decline of the
Buddenbrooks family in Mann's work, the one cited by the Nobel Committee
even over *The Magic Mountain.... *

Speaking of that mountain of sickness, Olga Tokarczuk's* The Empusium, *which
is in the answer song tradition, so to borrow allusively,
where I can see some pynchonian themes and even a trope or two...some
effects of modernity to generalize