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The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann John E Woods Books

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The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann John E Woods Books

I finally finished The Magic Mountain about our aimless young Hans Castorp, who visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanitorium in the Swiss Alps and, in a Kafkaesque twist, ends up staying there for seven years because of a mild fever. Reading the book was like catching a mild fever (in a good way), and, in taking more than a year to finish it (I was reading many other books), I feel that I, too, absurdly overstayed the length of my visit.

I read the book once, independently, with no assistance from critical essays or lit professors. I could have benefited from a critical introduction and multiple readings, as there is a great deal of symbolism that went over my head. While I missed much, I still appreciated the novel--its ambitious length; its polished, literate prose; its absurd humor; its wit. Mann's writing has a cheerful, effervescent energy that carries the reader through effortlessly. Reading the book was like slaloming down a tall ski slope on a fresh crisp heap of powdered snow.

While I can't claim to understand the ultimate significance of the plot, I enjoyed the odd, humorous interactions of the characters, I was dazzled by Mann's brilliance, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed my stay in the sanitorium.


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The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann John E Woods Books Reviews

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
I return to this novel again and again. It's a touchstone of the 20th century, one of the grand European intellectual novels that pose huge questions in terms of human beings in particular situations. The protagonist, Hans Castorp, is Mann's bourgeois Everyman, and it's wonderful haw a powerhouse intellectual like Mann can create a sympathetic but also mediocre hero who stumbles through a series of awakenings (and drowsings) on top of a mountain. But I'm making the book sound ponderous and pompous, and it's far too ironic and too seductive to be limited in that way. I came back to it because I was longing for a good long read. (Okay, not everyone's object of yearning.)

The Magic Mountain is also very much of its era. It was exactly luxurious institutions like the Berghof, along with those big hotel-spas in which the rich lived as they moved indolently over the face of Europe, that became impossible after WW I. But as the Settembrini-Naphta debates make very clear, the pleasures of unearned wealth and of relative peace are more passionate than Enlightenment values can address. Given the luxury, the lassitude and the license granted by tuberculosis and its promise of an early death, sexual, aesthetic and even mystical concerns become prominent. Mann gives us a great wallow in the Dionysian and doesn't, I think, endorse the life lit by reason unequivocally, although he's more skeptical about attaching value to a moribund leisure class. Which is only to say that I'm finding The Magic Mountain unexpectedly relevant for thinking about the One Per Cent and the rest of us on the flatlands.
I finally finished The Magic Mountain about our aimless young Hans Castorp, who visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanitorium in the Swiss Alps and, in a Kafkaesque twist, ends up staying there for seven years because of a mild fever. Reading the book was like catching a mild fever (in a good way), and, in taking more than a year to finish it (I was reading many other books), I feel that I, too, absurdly overstayed the length of my visit.

I read the book once, independently, with no assistance from critical essays or lit professors. I could have benefited from a critical introduction and multiple readings, as there is a great deal of symbolism that went over my head. While I missed much, I still appreciated the novel--its ambitious length; its polished, literate prose; its absurd humor; its wit. Mann's writing has a cheerful, effervescent energy that carries the reader through effortlessly. Reading the book was like slaloming down a tall ski slope on a fresh crisp heap of powdered snow.

While I can't claim to understand the ultimate significance of the plot, I enjoyed the odd, humorous interactions of the characters, I was dazzled by Mann's brilliance, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed my stay in the sanitorium.