The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
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| Worth the effort? Your thoughts on the value of The Magic Mountain. | 2 | 15 | 08/01/2008 05:39PM |
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Read in November, 2007
I just finished Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, tr. John Woods), and without a doubt it is among the five best works of literature that I have ever read. Covering more than 700 densely-packed pages, it is not for the light of heart, but provides ample reward for the tenacious reader. Published in 1924 and winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, The Magic Mountain should reside on your shelf next to The Brothers Karamazov, The Persian Letters, The Sorrows of Young Werthe...more
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Read in July, 2008
recommends it for:
People who like ideas, Catch-22
Two things that helped me read this book.
First, in German there is a tradition in literature called "Bildungsroman," similar to the coming of age archetype in English, focusing on the education of a young hero. In Magic Mountain the education we are confronted with is nothing less than a summation of the entirety of the "long 19th century" and initiation into the new 20th century. Thus we are presented with personification of contrasting ideals; sex, passion, philos, wine...more
First, in German there is a tradition in literature called "Bildungsroman," similar to the coming of age archetype in English, focusing on the education of a young hero. In Magic Mountain the education we are confronted with is nothing less than a summation of the entirety of the "long 19th century" and initiation into the new 20th century. Thus we are presented with personification of contrasting ideals; sex, passion, philos, wine...more
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Read in January, 1996
recommends it for:
Those interested in the philosophy of illness and early 20th-century European history.
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Read in November, 2007
Loved this. Need about four or five more readings. Set up as a novel, but is more a collection of essays on all sorts of human philosophical debates. Beautifully constructed. Must read more by this author.
FAVOURITE QUOTE: “What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure. It w...more
FAVOURITE QUOTE: “What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure. It w...more
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"I don't understand," Hans Castorp said. "I don't understand how someone can not be a smoker - why it's like robbing yourself of the best part of life, so to speak, or at least of an absolutely first rate pleasure. I eat, I look forward to it again, in fact I can honestly say that I actually only eat so that I can smoke, although that's an exaggeration of course. But a day without tobacco - that would be absolutely insipid, a dull, totally wasted day. And if some morning I had to ...more
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Read in August, 2008
Wow! I really recommend this particular edition because it is a newer translation and it starts with an introduction by A.S. Byatt. I found the introduction really helpful in that it gave me an idea of what to expect. It was also really useful to read it again after finishing the book.
The Magic Mountainis like a mash-up of Jane Austen for Germans, a classic Bildungsroman and Milton's Paradise Lost with a little magical feeling thrown in for good measure. It can be read as a...more
The Magic Mountainis like a mash-up of Jane Austen for Germans, a classic Bildungsroman and Milton's Paradise Lost with a little magical feeling thrown in for good measure. It can be read as a...more
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Read in June, 2008
Unusual and yet classic, in the same way Moby-Dick wraps an epic seafaring adventure around a digressive, encyclopedic treatise on whales. Mann's achievement might be more important, however, for attempting a complete psychological, historical, philosophical, aesthetic, religious, biological, mystical, astrological, and seasonal understanding of mankind at the brink of the catastrophe of World War I. The Magic Mountain is therefore utterly exhausting, sometimes agonizingly frustrat...more
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Read in January, 2002
Leer 'La montaña mágica' fue todo un tour de force, pero valió la pena, aunque dudo que repita la experiencia. Cierto que hay pasajes a los que mi limitada mente no llega y cierto que hay ratos en que se me hizo pesada, pero hay fragmentos de una belleza admirable. Y al fin y al cabo se trata de un libro que critica la abulia de la sociedad burguesa y retrata como un grupo de personas se refugian en un mundo donde no hay las responsabilidades que existen en el mundo real. Hans Castorp nunca m...more
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Read in March, 2008
I have started this book again, but have gotten a horrible yellow edition (WOW!) Since I left my other current read at work. I started this about a year ago, but the book is so massive that I had to take it back to the library before I could finish it.
I'll be reading this for awhile, not only because it's long (though I've read longer, faster) but because I am so enamored of it that I am reading it almost to the point of making my own annotated edition. The writing is magnificent (partic...more
I'll be reading this for awhile, not only because it's long (though I've read longer, faster) but because I am so enamored of it that I am reading it almost to the point of making my own annotated edition. The writing is magnificent (partic...more
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Read in May, 2008
This was a very long read and definitely needed some editing. I was struggling a bit since there are fairly long passages that are pretty tedious - many pages at a time. I enjoyed the book better when I started "flipping" thru these passages - in general something I rarely do, but really needed to be done in this case.
Despite the above shortcomings, I very much enjoyed the book as a whole - I found it very interesting and I sensed it could very well be a truly "great" ...more
Despite the above shortcomings, I very much enjoyed the book as a whole - I found it very interesting and I sensed it could very well be a truly "great" ...more
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Read in November, 2003
The Magic Mountain is a meditation on humanity. And reading it is not unlike meditating. You are taken up to the magic mountain with Hans Castorp, a thoroughly average guy, to explore the reaches of human experience - philosophy, love, art, music, culture. Time slips away. The whole of human experience is made to feel like a long drawn-out Sunday afternoon, not entirely pleasant but not unpleasant. In a word, sedated. And then the war comes and the world awakes from its slumber. It's a novel of ...more
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Read in January, 2008
Re-reading The Magic Mountain again, since I first read it in my 20's, has been a revelation in all the details I know I must have missed, all the history and political references I did not yet understand, and the whole notion of a Zeitroman which has become one of my favorite forms of literature. Telling of time passing is extraordinary and Mann's method is so calm, so unassuming and yet draws one into the peculiar time-space of der Zauberberg. My favorite chapter is 'Snow'---as I am explorin...more
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Read in May, 2004
If you give this book a chance, and some long quiet hours with your full attention, you will be in the midst of incredible richness.
Wise, erudite, deeply engaged but titanically remote, grand, magisterial, ironic, cosmipolitan, comic in a sly gently mocking way.
They don't write 'em like this anymore. the title is onomatpoeic. The book itself is mountainous....some of the deepest philosophical prophecy on what the 20th Century was, and would become. The characters are allegorical, tr...more
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Read in February, 1998
recommends it for:
Masochists
I could only pick one year for when I read this book, but the truth is that I started it in 1991 and read 100 pages every year until I finished the damn thing in 1998.
This book was horrific. There was no point, no enjoyment, no anything save for a harrowing description, 900 pages in length, of some sad sack in a tuberculosis sanitarium. The only reason I even finished the book was that I refused to let it defeat me.
It wasn't until a friend I respect above all others urged me, pleaded wi...more
This book was horrific. There was no point, no enjoyment, no anything save for a harrowing description, 900 pages in length, of some sad sack in a tuberculosis sanitarium. The only reason I even finished the book was that I refused to let it defeat me.
It wasn't until a friend I respect above all others urged me, pleaded wi...more
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Read in August, 2008
This is a weighty book, not only because of its length but also its subject matter. There are frequent abstract, intellectual discussions through out the novel reinforcing the back covers phrase: "a book of ideas." The Magic Mountain is surely such a book and it is for this reason I would highly recommend it. Only Mann's ironic style of writing could pull off such high-minded themes in an entertaining and thoughtful - but not too pedantic - way. The book so greatly symbolizes the atmos...more
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Read in January, 2008
recommends it for:
People who have nothing to do for months
Thomas Mann wants to mess with your sense of time! Calendar pages will fly by, the short hand on your watch will spin dizzingly, and wrinkles will huddle on your brow (perhaps arabesque wrinkles, like those of Pieperkorn) before you finish this book. The tome rivals in size the mountain it describes--and like a mountain, there are parts that vivify and inspire, and parts so unremarkable that only a continual journey upward can improve the view, change the terrain. The chapter called "Sno...more
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Read in March, 1994
This was required reading in my college days and the first 100 pages or so nearly killed me -- thanks to the mealy-mouthed middle class hero, Hans Castorp -- German bourgeois everyman. Trudging through I came to love him (and recognized my hatred as a form of thinly veiled self-loathing ).
If you can't vacation for a year or so in the Swiss Alps at mountain top resort, read this and become a temporary resident of the Berghof sanatorium. You'll become immersed in the world of sweet ignorant l...more
If you can't vacation for a year or so in the Swiss Alps at mountain top resort, read this and become a temporary resident of the Berghof sanatorium. You'll become immersed in the world of sweet ignorant l...more
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Read in January, 2008
Meshing and weaving symbolism and realism on every page, Thomas Mann's famous novel of a sick, decadent Europe before the Great War seems to sum up his grim view of the entire West. Not only was the war inevitable, it was deserved.
The philosophical debates between Settembrinin and Naphta battling for young Hans Castorp's soul make up the core of the novel, but in the end they are rendered folly and meaningless. There is Mann's ironic twist, with a hard dark bite. Hans Castorp dedicates seve...more
The philosophical debates between Settembrinin and Naphta battling for young Hans Castorp's soul make up the core of the novel, but in the end they are rendered folly and meaningless. There is Mann's ironic twist, with a hard dark bite. Hans Castorp dedicates seve...more
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Read in January, 2008
It is, for sure, a challenging book. The middle section is thick with philosophical debate between a secular humanist and a spiritual philosopher. Much of this dialogue I did not understand; whole passages passed me as I shrugged somewhat disappointedly. But the central character, Hans Castorp, along with his cousin and a few of his friends--these people are precisely that: people. As an accomplishment one would be hard pressed to refute the standing of Magic Mountain. The pleasure of reading it...more
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Read in June, 2008
recommends it for:
People who like beautiful prose.
I'm still navigating my way through this magnificent book. It's so good I got two copies, one with the H. Lowe Porter translation, one by John Woods. The prose is so delightful that I'm going be dumbstruck when I finish it. To that end, I've bought 'Joseph and his Brothers' and 'Buddenbrooks' just so I can continue reading Mann.
It's the type of book where you just want to luxuriate in the writing, the ideas and the experience of the reading.
The different translations are fascinating too...more
It's the type of book where you just want to luxuriate in the writing, the ideas and the experience of the reading.
The different translations are fascinating too...more
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