The Magic Mountain

I stuck with it and finished it and found it fulfilling. But I wouldn't recommend it unless one is a die-hard Mann reader. Probably it would be best to start with something else like Death in Venice. Mann can write great poetic prose. I found it to be a meditation on time and death, therefore life, in a different era. It is long, archaic, poorly translated from a foreign language (German) and its parts are somewhat disjointed, perhaps a result of its twelve year creation.

“The Magic Mountain” is a classic of European literature and is regarded as Mann’s opus. However this copy is a poor copy of the book. The type often begins in the middle of the page and the type is preposterously small. The portions where characters are conversing in French are not in translation. Do not purchase this copy.I went to a bookstore and bought an excellent copy published by Vintage Press. The translation captures Mann’s wit and irony and the dialogue that is intended to be spoken in French is italicized and in English translation.

If there is a book that fits this treatment, I have to say Magic Mountain is the one. The copy I received was indeed pristine. The weight and beauty of the print really go here. Here's to hoping the 50 Shades forever remain in paperback.

Mann's epic can be read at so many intellectual and symbolic levels that it demands to be reread again and again. The most surface level reading, the one you'll get on the first pass, is highly stimulating: an allegorical playing out of various philosophical approaches current at the time (i.e. humanism, marxism etc). The characters and plot are sure to keep you reading even if the intellectual debates of the early 20th century aren't your bag.

Very difficult to read translation form the original German. Mann can be descriptive in his writings, but when translating to English, one needs to understand the meaning of phrases, not just swap words. The story is very good.

Es una clásica reseña sobre los efectos individuales y colectivos de una grave enfermedad en una comunidad cerrada.

Mann seems to know a lot about many different things. The depth of philosophic dialogue is astounding. It reminds me of Marcel Proust in his ability to expound endlessly on a topic. It provides a clear view of pre-war Europe with its changing mores and budding inventions of the times, and the odd seeming methods of treating tuberculosis in the thin cold air of the Alps before the advent of antibiotics. Mann paints a compelling picture of the times. A thoroughly delightful book.

Astounding novel that defines all the intellectual, political and nationalistic forces in pre-WWII Europe, embodied in the personalities of patients in a tuberculosis sanitarium. Difficult to read, but well worth it. Stick with the H. T. Lowe-Porter translation.

I first read, “The Magic Mountain,” when I was a teenager and still recall the magical feeling I received when I had finished. However, I had no doubt that much of the novel had passed me by, at such a young age, and so thought I would like to re-visit it. Having read it for the second time, more than thirty years apart, I am still aware that there was much, especially among the long, philosophical discussions, that I probably didn’t really get. However, the magic is still, most certainly, there.Thomas Mann started writing this novel in 1912, but it was not finished, or published, until 1924. Obviously, this work was interrupted, and vastly changed, by WWI and led Mann to reflect on European society. Mann, himself, suggested that you need to read this book first and you certainly do feel that it is a novel which will stay with you and that it has many, many themes to reflect upon: obviously, illness and death (this is set in a sanatorium after all), a sense of being separate and apart from the world, time, love, desire, humanism, radicalism, and duty, best represented by Joachim Ziemmsen.It is Ziemmsen, a young soldier, who is originally resident at the Berghof, when his cousin, Hans Castorp, comes to visit him. What begins as a short visit, with his idea of staying merely weeks, laughed at by those who measure time in months, at the shortest, is gradually extended into months and then years. Hans is young, innocent, eager to experience everything and yet, indolent enough to embrace the languid, comfortable world of the Berghof. Yet, although the sanatorium appears to visitors as an isolated world of comfort and privilege, there is, undoubtedly, real illness and death behind closed doors.Thomas Mann manages to convey complex and difficult ideas, but he never forgets that he is creating a novel, and maintains the storyline of the TB sanatorium and of the inhabitants who live, and work, there. A novel is, essentially, about its characters, and you do care about what happens to those who appear within the pages of this huge novel, as Mann weaves a world of ideas, characters and themes, which not only highlight events leading to the first world war, but suggest political ideas leading to the second. I have a feeling this is a novel I will come back to again, later in my life, and gain more from every time I do read it.

The architect Cedric Price not only supplied drawings of how to construct his buildings, he provided instructions on how to demolish them. In a not dissimilar way Thomas Mann not only supplies us with an eight hundred page novel called The Magic Mountain, he provides accompanying instructions to the effect that we should read it not once, but twice. I’m not surprised at his prescription…Here are some of the things he manages to pack in to those eight hundred pages; X Rays, photography, cinematography, the gramophone, Einstein’s theory of relativity, clairvoyance, women’s rights, ice-skating, ethnicity, the origins of the universe, freemasonry, psychoanalysis, environmental recycling, justice, ‘the Remarkable Theorem’, pig-drawing, five square meals a day, stamp collecting, magic realism, chocolate eating, operatic arias, the Milky Way, the wearing of allegorical costumes, mindfulness, and the art of duelling. He also exposes the delicate intellect of the reader to the theories of Rousseau, Goethe, Petrarch, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. As a novel these days it could well be seen as an agent’s nightmare. But Mann has his funny side. ‘Jest’ he calls it, and claims that he wrote it as light relief after Death in Venice. ‘Jest’ - his word not the translator’s for Mann always insisted on writing his ‘sleeve’ notes in English. Some folk find the novel a ‘little too German’ he suggests. The book is undoubtedly funny; I mean what man would think of carrying about his person – instead of a photo of his beloved - an X Ray of her thorax? That really would be one for the smart phone! The Hofrat of the Berghaus Sanatorium is characterised as being unctuously lascivious, and the implication is that he’s hell-bent on either seducing or bullying his patients into staying there as long as possible – in the narrator Hans Castorp’s case running to a period of seven years – seven years of shelling out extortionate fees! This doesn’t mean to say that Mann is underplaying the scourge of tuberculosis, on the contrary, there’s a persistent patient death rate throughout Hans’ stay, its’ just that Mann is seeing a funny side of The Berghaus, as if it were a kind of dating agency for the infirm. But it’s not satire; Mann is far cleverer than that. He chooses the word ‘jest’ because it rhymes with ‘quest’(don't forget, the sleeve notes are written in English) which is what the Magic Mountain is, with its rather dim-witted but highly personable hero Hans in search of the Holy Grail, a journey full of danger, romance, and alchemy. Does he find it?Well, to discover that you will have to read The Magic Mountain…Not once, but twice!

I got this, after enjoying Death in Venice. I continue to enjoy this book, however - it's supposedly an English translation, but only about half way through, do you find out that vast vast passages are written in French.Entire chapters of dialogue that you either need to learn the language, or spend ages putting through Google translate which is painful and disruptive.This is supposedly to keep the nuance of the German v French languages, but really... what's the point if you've purchased the English version? Surely this could have been achieved in another way.Very frustrating.

I have read most of Mann's work, all Vintage with the striking red spines. His work is exemplary and covers so much it is difficult to select a favourite. Door me the Magic Mountain is e regular re-read for me. Multifaceted like a beautifully cut literary diamond. If this your first Mann work enjoy as there is so much to look forward to - Lotte, Buddenbrooks, Ashenbach, and the genius that is the short stories.

I have to admit it is a long time since I read this but it is the best novel I have come across and it led me to consume everything he wrote. Very few authors can match him, possibly Gottfried Keller comes the closest... He is also a master of the short story and again very few get near him. If you want to know what true genius is then have a look.