The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

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In a word: feverish

In a sentence: Atop the Magic Mountain sits the Berghof, a retreat for those with tuberculosis or wish for a place to dissociate, of which Hans Castorp is both.

Synopsis: Hans Castorp departs his life in the flatlands to visit his cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Up there, he acclimatizes a little too well, and becomes enthralled with the life of the mind he encounters there.

Reactions: I chose The Magic Mountain for a variety of reasons: it is Thomas Mann’s favorite of his own novels, an inspiration for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an essential Pulitzer Prize winning German author, introspective, surreal, fun. What I found was a largely philosophical novel concerned with a battle between good and evil in the heart of ‘life’s delicate child’ which was doomed to ripple across Europe in all the horrors of The Great War. The protagonist Hans Castorp brings a loveable element into the otherwise serious tale with his various feverish, awkward rants on anything from botany to astrology, frequently checked by his fatherly friend in philosophy, Herr Settembrini.

I would be loath to discuss The Magic Mountain without mentioning its revolutionary use of time. Mann describes the passage of time as the passage of music in that each only passes based on the events that they contain. Therefore, if nothing happens, if the notes cease to play, there is no time or music occurring at all. Thus, on The Magic Mountain, where time is marked by events which are cushioned in the horizontal, time passes in great dollops, all at once or one excruciating second at a time.

Read if: you wish to explore the European psyche on the brink of crisis, or are interested in a transition novel between the classic Modernist and Contemporary literary traditions.