The Magic Mountain (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics)
by Thomas Mann
published
April 29th 2005
(first published 1924)
by Alfred A. Knopf
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binding
Hardcover, 854 pages
isbn
1857152891
(isbn13: 9781857152890)
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 2087)
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 January, 1996
recommends it for:
Those interested in the philosophy of illness and early 20th-century European history.
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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 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 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 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 July, 2000
Another one I read again and again. Do I really have to explain why this is a great book? Around a thousand bold pages dissecting humanity within the microcosmos of a Swiss sanatorium, a heap of details and backstory as heavy as the surrounding mountain range, and yet through it all Mann's fine, detached irony sings in the background like a tense wire. This is pure, omniscent genius, and huge fun to read. The ending, aptly titled "Thunderclap," puts an end to the detached commentary, a...more
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Read in October, 2006
recommends it for:
Literary readers, readers with a serious illness, psychology readers
I've spent the last thirteen years in a state of perpetual pain due to a neuromuscular condition. Often the condition and the life it's forced me to lead make me feel insane, or at least sane but detached from the world. No book has quite captured the detachment sickness causes like Magic Mountain, so much so that I was convinced Mann must have been using his thin fantasy premise of a mountain away from time as a wedge to get into this mindset. It's not an entertaining read; often it's as...more
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One of the most influential and celebrated German works of the 20th century has been newly rendered in English by Woods, twice winner of the PEN Translation Prize. First published in 1929, Mann's novel tells the story of Hans Castorp, a modern everyman who spends seven years in an Alpine sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, finally leaving to become a soldier in World War I. Isolated from the concerns of the everyday world, he is exposed to the wide range of ideas that shaped a world on the ver...more
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Read in October, 2008
recommends it for:
People who didnt feel like Hesse's Siddhartha was German enough
So I finally finished this book. I think I originally decided to read it because I like long books, or maybe it was that Blonde Redhead song. It took me over two years of taking it with me everywhere, losing it, buying it again, picking up where I left off.
I hated this book when I first started reading it, but by the time I finished reading it I was obsessed with it. The knowing tongue in cheek humor contributes to a boring but engrossing rhythm to it that kept me coming back to find o...more
I hated this book when I first started reading it, but by the time I finished reading it I was obsessed with it. The knowing tongue in cheek humor contributes to a boring but engrossing rhythm to it that kept me coming back to find o...more
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Not for everybody. A very long and slow moving read but I think this is one of Thomas Mann's best novels. A book of nations, ideas and idealogies played out in a Swiss sanatorium. Witty, satirical, moody, and at times depressing-reminded me of my other life when we lived in good old Deutschland.
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Thomas Mann's opus follows Hans Castorp's visit to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a stay which would last seven years. This immensely rich and complex novel is, at its core, about temporality. We are given numerous conversations between the primary actors about the plasticity of time, about the ways in which our sense of time shape our existence. What is particularly brilliant about Mann's prose in 'The Magic Mountain,' is his ability to provoke sensations in the reader that mirror...more
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Read in October, 2008
"Time - yet not the time told by the station clock, moving with a jerk five minutes at once, but rather the time of a tiny timepiece, the hand of which on cannot see move, or the time the grass keeps when it grows, so unobservably one would say it does not grow at all, until some morning the fact is undeniable - time, a line composed of a succession of dimensionless points...time, we say, had gone on, in its furtive, unobservable, competent way, bringing about changes."
This book cl...more
This book cl...more
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No review yet, just small diary notes while reading.
September 11, 2008:
200+ pages in and already I'm very impressed. The prose has got me hooked (I am reading it in German) and some of the passages easily belong to my most beloved in literature (the memories of Pribislav Hippe, the canoe trip, and that matter-of-fact, yet ominous last sentence of the second chapter: "Er fuhr auf drei Wochen."). Wow... who would've thought? I expected this book to be a drawn-out, timid affair, bu...more
September 11, 2008:
200+ pages in and already I'm very impressed. The prose has got me hooked (I am reading it in German) and some of the passages easily belong to my most beloved in literature (the memories of Pribislav Hippe, the canoe trip, and that matter-of-fact, yet ominous last sentence of the second chapter: "Er fuhr auf drei Wochen."). Wow... who would've thought? I expected this book to be a drawn-out, timid affair, bu...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 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 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 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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