The Magic Mountain (Vintage International)

(Not Posted on Amazon) “Early 20th Century Masterpiece” This is Mann's great masterpiece, capping a literary career that won him the Nobel Prize in 1929. (And that was in a time when the Nobel Prize really meant something and had not yet descended into being a bauble of political correctness and uninspired multiculturalism.) It tells the story of Hans Castorp, described as a "perfectly ordinary" young man, who travels to Switzerland before World War I to visit his cousin in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos, now famous for its annual winter symposium of the wealthy, powerful, and brilliant. Castorp is highly intelligent, rather lazy, and cosseted; certainly he is set in his ways and highly opinionated, even arrogant when we first meet him. But in Switzerland, he will be forced to change the way he thinks and lives. He will be diagnosed with tuberculosis himself, and his planned three-week social visit will become a seven-year rest cure among a fascinating menagerie of rich and eccentric invalids from all over the world. They live on the magic mountain, cut off form the world below and ambivalent about it, all of them very ill and many of them dying. The sanitarium sails above the world down below, like a very comfortable cruise ship endlessly sailing the Pacific but never touching land; every day is full of elegance, comfort, good food, deferential service and varied leisure, some music and lively gossip. But all is not well; this is a ship of fools, a voyage of the damned. Mann means this collection of eccentric characters to be a metaphor for the nations of Europe before the Great War that changed all of them, devastated most of them, and eliminated several of them altogether. It is not just the Ottoman Empire that is collapsing and is "the Sick Man of Europe;" all of the nations of Europe are sick in this metaphor, they are all corrupt and ill in their own way, some of them fatally, and they are all in breezy, elitist, and arrogant denial. They are all ripe for caricature and Mann has great fun sending them up in a novel that is very long, nuanced and brilliantly observed with tremendous detail and fascinating character insights. The Magic Mountain is also metaphorical in another powerful and obvious way. Each of us is dying over the span of our lifetimes, our deaths are implied by our very existence, and we go bravely on from day to day refusing to acknowledge that painful fact. This novel stirs interesting feelings in each reader about the privilege of life, its finiteness and purpose, the value of time and of each day and hour. But this is not a lugubrious or morbid book. Far from it; it is deeply droll, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Mann mines every character and every situation for its essential possibility of human humor and preposterousness, its pathos and sympathy. Just listen to this brief passage when the hero is X-rayed for the first time: "With the eyes of his Tienappel forebear–penetrating, clairvoyant eyes–he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. And he made the same face he usually made when listening to music–a rather dull, sleepy, and devout face, his head tilted toward one shoulder, his mouth half-open." It is a characteristic passage, sympathetic and hilarious at the same time. Great ideas are rolled through this mammoth text: What is the meaning and nature of time? How are the mental, physical and emotional selves integrated in the unity of personality? How shall we live though we know we are to die? How are love and eroticism similar and dissimilar? A director of the sanatorium lectures controversially and often, in what were the early days of the practice of psychoanalysis, about love as a force conducive to illness. There are very long debates between two highly disputatious and pretentious pedagogues, the humanist Settembrini and the man of God Naphta; these are the opportunity to explore deep themes like the conflict between nature and religion, wellness and illness, the spirit and the body, time and eternity, and so on. It is an intellectual feast that can be rather head-spinning. The very middle of the book contains a chapter titled “Walpurgis Night”, what the Germans call Mardi Gras, and this chapter feels like a kind of fulcrum that the book balances upon. The chapter is perfectly written: extremely thought-provoking, very tender sentimentally, but also extremely funny. After that chapter, the book rushes downhill like the speedy, thrilling and efficient Swiss toboggans that take the deceased patients from their beautiful world on the magic mountain back to the banal reality of the world “down below.” One can’t help having the strong feeling that this is very much what purgatory is going to be like: not a terrible place, but a place you would like to eventually leave, and one that is repetitive, curative, well-managed but on the whole rather dull and tiresome. The writing contains hypnotically descriptive passages that rise to pure lyricism. The chapter called “Snow” in the second half of the book, for example, is sublimely lyrical and at the same time intensely dramatic. It ends with high drama and a very poignant and moving last few pages about the beginning of the cataclysm that was the First World War. This very long book is powerfully conceived and masterfully executed, with a perfect balance achieved between seriousness and farce, character and plot. It is Mann’s great masterwork and here it is brilliantly rendered in English by the prize-winning translator John E. Woods in this very lively and eminently readable edition.

I am reading this classic with a friend in another state and we wanted to have the same edition for reference when we discuss. Although a lengthy novel, Mann writes so well and the translation is very up to date. I am still reading but love the book. This Everyman Edition is narrower than other books which I love and it is not too heavy despite being hardcover. The only objection is the small print.

Thomas Mann is at the quintessence of twentieth century thought in The Magic Mountain. Those of you who have read Proust might find the book's central thesis similar: (And indeed, the book does have a theme, as much it rambles and tries to confuse you) the subjectivity and illusory reality of Time. From there Mann is a thinker unto himself for he makes sure that you take that statement through all its corollaries. You can't measure the passing of time objectively, and if you had lost your senses (or perhaps you are seriously ill) you will have soon lost grip of its passing; before you've gone to tea again, dinner, and to your second rest cure, you're in your death throes. On the "Magic" Mountain, what's to separate the three weeks that Hans, our main character, initially intends to stay from the seven years it does take him to "be cured," when each day is characterized by monotonous routine? OK, I'll admit it, this book is not for philistines looking for entertainment, as more than one reviewer has found out. This is cold, hard metaphysics, at times strikingly expressed. The book tempts you to think death is nothing if not constantly occurring, and time nothing other than a "flat-land" device for slowing down that omnipresent decomposition and oxidation of your body, "the natural burning off of life." Yes, reader, science is at work in this novel. And if I were to flesh out the thesis further, the grotesque and often painful imagery of the sanatorium is Mann's great argument against what science -- medicine -- or further, the industrial revolution -- has given old, antedeluvian society. New ideas work like a disease, no less .. a terminal, horrible dehumanization that makes you doubt all measures in life -- allowing the blinkered Western Civ nothing left but the absolute nihilism. Beyond the ideas, there is art in Mann's very prolix creation. Unlike other disjointed novels that delve into a character's subconscious, Mann manages to weave it all together. Cliches, slips of the tongue, and dreams hide and obscure fuller, interconnected emotions and strivings that are expressed directly only at brief, lucid moments in the prose -- an original and ingenious device. For example, at the beginning of the book the reader can make no sense of Hans' dreaming and fantasizing about his schoolboy crush for another boy name Hippe -- whose only direct contact he had was that he borrowed a pencil from him. Hans connects this image and episode with his current infatuation for terminally ill guest Clavdia Chauchat. For two hundred pages this point is drawn upon from various angles until finally Mann concocts an occasion where Hans asks Clavdia for a pencil .. and the dialogue, gestures, and body language mirror exactly that long ago encounter with Hippe. It strikes you and comes out of nowhere. Clavdia leaves Berghof the next day, just as Hippe left Hamburg in Hans's youth, leaving the latter to dream and ponder further. Hans is very much an anti-hero .. while at the same time he is the novel's draw. He's pathetic, lazy, all too comfortable with the disturbing atmosphere of the terminally ill that Mann sketches around him. But unlike everyone else, he seems to be able to preserve simple human optimism and beauty that is obvious dead all around him. Though it's absurd and perverted hope and happiness -- and meant be so. Disturbingly so. Hans is not hopeful about leaving .. rather he is able to look forward to death, all while reclining on his balcony, smoking his cigars, and taking general pleasure as his temperature rises and he becomes presumably more ill. The "Magic" pervades him. The best that can be said for Mann is this stuff is original while maintaining a great depth of allusion and allegory. Mann doesn't forget he's German -- there's plenty of Faust here. Even a passing reference to Schiller that sticks in your mind. The book abounds with representations and caricatures of Western thought .. everyone is present at the death march that is Mann's portrait of dying Western culture.

In 1912, Thomas Mann visited his wife, Katia, convalescing in the alps at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos Switzerland. It gave rise to the fictional Berghoff Sanatorium in “The Magic Mountain” long before Davos became a playground for barons of industry and heads of state attending The World Economic Forum. But even in that era, when people, not goods, were being consumed, and mycobacteria were the consumers, elite Europeans still formed cliques, intrigues and dalliances in the sanitariums that housed them as they recovered from an unpredictable illness. The book introduces Hans Gastorp as he visits Davos, sharing with readers his opinions on the behavior and conversations of its inhabitants. After his stay is unexpectedly extended, Hans, neither a hero or anti-hero, is seen as someone capable of enjoying comestibles ,scenery, music and cigarettes and willing to learn from what he can gather from social encounters. As an amiable passenger on a ship of ambulatory consumptives, Hans provides Thomas Mann, the book’s author, a foil to sketch character, debate religion, philosophy and politics, discuss psychoanalysis, and explore romantic desire, suffering, death and time. The “Magic” of the mountain can best be appreciated by what it lacks, what Jose Ortega Gasset refers to as “The most salient characteristic of life, is its coerciveness: it is always urgent ‘here and now’ without any postponement. Life is fired at us point blank”. The absence of such pressure frees its inhabitants, who are distant from the work, cares, children and spouses they left behind in the flatlands. Additional magic is provided by this kingdom’s impeccable 5-star accommodation, sumptuous meals, and scheduled health and leisure activities. Their rhythmic repetition coupled with the uncertainty of anyone’s future ensures that residents focus on the essentials of rest and recovery. The book, long, thoughtful and vividly written, takes the reader on a slow ascent into an upper world and its characters, and their hopes, awareness, virtues and follies framed in the global events of the era and the triumphs and tragedy of European history. At the end, it descends rapidly down to the coercive flatlands, which have been unimaginably and unmagically altered in the interim. Highly recommended, especially for those comfortable with unhurried reading and a willingness to reflect on the past and its implications for nations and individuals today.

I believe that Thomas Mann's greatest work is Joseph and His Brothers, an incomparable feat of archaeology, ethnography, geography and knowledge of the ancient world. But it is a journey unto itself, about 1400 pages in four volumes in the original. The Magic Mountain is half that size, but a doorstop nonetheless. Written from an author's viewpoint, the novel traces the trajectory of a young German man suffering from tuberculosis, who is sent to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, ostensibly to visit his similarly afflicted cousin. He ends up staying for seven years. Everything that could be said about this great work probably has been said better by others. To me, the writing is unique: beautiful, heartbreaking, different in its choice of images, and German in its discursive style. The characters are winning, despite their many flaws and tendency to stereotype: the Italian humanist, the reactionary Catholic ex-Jesuit scholar; the voluptuous Russian enchantress; the wealthy bloviator who charms his companions; the young soldier who wants to be cured so he can go to the front; and so on. Not to mention our hero, who struggles with being a man and with his sexuality, even in the face of mortal illness. The action, such as it is, has three scales: the global contest between modern ideas and well-worn absolutism; the sanatorium's parlor dynamics, set amidst the dining room and curing regimes; and the personal psychological struggles of all concerned, especially the young protagonist. A sense of isolation and irrelevance pervades the Berghof, even as Europe comes apart before WWI. The health of our characters mirrors the health or pathology of Europe as Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolve in conflict. And the eternal Alps, known for their unchanging majesty, impose surprise and risk on our ailing fictional people. Mann is not for the lighthearted, and some of the digressions into notions of liberty, order, modernity, infinity, God, death, war and peace, etc., will wear a normal person to a frazzle. But one can't doubt Mann's command of his material. The ending came as a surprise to me, especially as I had been lulled into thinking nothing would ever happen. But, of course, I had that in common with everyone in the book.

Thi is a heavy 20th C classic, from a bygone era. Beautifully written. For those who enjoy good literature.

The Magic Mountain is brilliantly written being a Nobel Prize winner, and yet... I'm not sure what this is all about. Of course, the writing style is very different from more modern writings with a great deal of descriptive detail I'm just not used to. It moves much slower than a modern novel and is not adventuresome in the least. It takes some getting used to if you're used to modern writers. I'm glad I persisted in finishing this rather long book, as the ending was definitely worth the time.

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann [1924], English translated from the German by John E. Woods, 1995. Thomas Mann's classic is among the top five to ten of my list of favorite novels, one, like Gravity's Rainbow or Mickelsson's Ghosts, that I will reread every few years or so. As with any "classic" novel, it works on numerous levels, is grand in scope, philosophical in depth, populated with memorable characters. It is a novel that makes you think. It teaches. The novel takes place in the years before World War I. Hans Castorp, the protagonist, travels from his home in Hamburg, to vist his cousin, Joachim, who is recuperating from tuberculosis at the sanitorium Berghof in the Swiss mountains. He plans to spend a few weeks with his cousin before assuming his new engineering apprenticeship in Germany. What transpires over the following 700+ pages is a look at life, and death, in this isolated community of international patients representing all philosophical and political viewpoints. Mann uses the sanatorium as a microcosm of a terminally ill Europe as it approaches the Great War. Hans Castorp is the naive, non-political engineer who is pulled and cajoled by anarchists to socialists, to monarchists. And there is intrigue. There are detailed medical descriptions concerning the life and care at a turn of the century sanatorium, much of it gleaned from Mann's own stay at such a facility when his wife was recuperating from tuberculosis. For me, Mann created an alien world, yet so interesting that I didn't want to leave it. There are great discussions on the concept of time, and how time for the patients, confined to the mountain and to their daily regime, seems compressed: six months are like a few weeks to them. There is too much within the pages of this book to do it any justice. There have been entire books written about The Magic Mountain, and many essays

five stars

Buen libro

Received a fake copy

Arrived in great condition. Thank you!

Classic Mann novel and heavy prose well worth the effort in reading.