At the risk of being labelled a Philistine, I declare that this book is one of the most insufferably boring tomes that has ever made it onto my bedside table. I admit that I only struggled my way through the first 170 pages, but that was enough to convince me that I should not waste any more minutes of my precious life wading through any more of this drivel.

I know, I have also been chastised for criticising modern art in the same way. Tracey Emin's "Unmade Bed" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Moun More...

Imagine hiking up a steep mountain. You are not quite winning the game of hide & seek with the Sun and it has got its fiery eyes firmly on you. Your legs are chewing your ears off with incessant grumbling. With each step you take, a wish to flop down right there grows stronger. One of these steps carries you to a spot where a spectacular vista suddenly opens up before you. For the briefest moment, the scene in front of you consumes not only your vision, but your consciousness. It is only in More...

In 1997, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, ~4 am, mid-June, after a college friend's band that was blowing up at the time played the Middle East and everyone afterwards came back to our place, I remember a coolish girl on our porch saying to me something like "Oh, you like to read? I bet you like boring shit like The Magic Mountain." I don't remember my response but since then whenever I've thought of this book I've flashed to that scene and her assumption that only pretentious little fuckers read books More...

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a contestant for the spot of my absolute favorite novel. The judgment is only being withheld due to the fact that I currently don't have a review for Of Human Bondage, so no accurate comparison can be made as of yet. However. It must be said that if the previous book gave me hope for the human condition, this one explosively revitalized my admiration for the human ideal.
Few people write like this nowadays. Most don't appreciate their world and its myriad ideas and o More...

"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 tell myself: th More...

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...

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 with me, b More...

In my opinion, Thomas Mann was a genius and one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century. I originally read most of his works through the H. T. Lowe-Porter translations, which, though elegant and literary in their own right, took several liberties with Mann's ideas, subtleties, and humor. I have been grabbing up the newer translations by John E. Woods which, in my opinion, are superior to Lowe-Porter's in virtually every aspect. If you are planning to tackle this, probably the best More...

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, cosmopolitan, 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, true, but the c More...

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 frustrating and repeti More...

I started this book about a year ago. It was a little like riding a bicycle into a lake. I powered through the first chapters, full of optimism and the excitement of discovering early 20th century Germany, but I rapidly slowed, and then, after a chapter entirely in French, which I understood only by virtue of three years of high school French (a long time ago), and which I can find no translation of, I stopped dead in the water.
After a good break, I felt ready to go back to that world; and I fo More...

An astonishing book, as impactful (is that a word?) in its way as "War and Peace." (2010)

(2012) Still an amazing book, two years later. I don't adore every page of it--I get bogged down when Mann gets abstruse--but the book is so full of heart and soul and mind, great characters, interesting conversation, and fine writing.

This book was quite a challenge for me to read, both due to length and an abundance of heavy philosophy throughout. There's no doubt in my mind that Mann's prose is virtuostic and perhaps peerless in certain respects. Magic Mountain has great writing and plenty of intelligently explored themes (time, love, religion, humanity, metaphysics). The characters are generally amusing and Mann does a humorous job in assigning one dimensional personalites to the supporting characters.

The main problem for More...

Time time time... I have the flu, which is the perfect condition in which to read 700 page book about a tuberculosis sanitarium. It changes your sense of time to read a book like this, to yield yourself up to the experience described. What does it mean to have time, to fill time, to experience time as short or long. I am rereading this book, and enjoying all my college-day marginalia--find it hugely preferable to reading books annotated by random anonymous people... Everything fascinating is al More...

So, I finally finished Der Zauberberg. And even though it took me over a year, with many stops and reading other books in between, it was a wonderful, unforgettable experience. Especially near the end, when the pace picks up and the prose is just amazing, sometimes pure perfection. You really have to stand in awe of the book as a whole, and those who have read the whole thing will be able to see the impressive composition of it, and how even the long, drawn-out parts have their place and meaning More...

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 was the More...

Oh man. This was probably one of the most difficult novels I've read since Don Quixote.

There are so many points during the narrative where the characters are discussing the nature of time, existence, etc. After awhile it's hard to read another monologue about humanistic theory, and the nature of being.

I would say that the last half of the novel is actually very readable and informative.

I read somewhere that Thomas Mann suggested that to fully understand this book is to read it twice. I don't th More...

When thinking of The Magic Mountain and Hans Castorp, the young protagonist of the novel, I cannot help but consider both the the depiction of male youth. And then compare it to that in Death in Venice. It seems central to Mann’s own internal struggles. It is this and the loss of innocence resulting from Hans' gradually increasing knowledge that interested me the most. As Hans learns from discussions with Settembrini and Naphtha he gradually grows into a young man of some little wisdom. This inc More...

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 littl More...

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 grindi More...

Read at my blog http://southcoastsounds.org.uk/wordpr... or as below[return][return]I have wanted to read this book for a long time, and decided to take the plunge on discovering this new translation by John E Woods. This is a monster of a book - at 854 closely typeset pages, it is going to take a long time to read - in my case, the best part of a month. One of the main topics of this books is “time”. The patients at the mountain sanatorium initially arrive for what they think is going to be sta More...

Un grammofono elettronico consolava le solitarie notti di Hans Castorp. “Questi dunque […] i dischi che Castorp preferiva”:



Radamès ha tradito, per una schiava barbara, la patria e l’onore. La purezza del suo cuore gli permette di affrontare con fermezza il tribunale dei sacerdoti e l’indignazione di Amneris. Condannato a perire in una tomba sotterranea, Radamès troverà conforto in Aida, che per amore ha scelto di intrecciare il suo destino a quello dell’amato. Può esservi amore senza sofferenza? More...

Way back when, I was a college student who had a fair amount of time on my hands, and Thomas Mann on my to-read list. I got a paperback copy of The Magic Mountain. But after 300-odd pages I was weary of reading about sputum-covered hankies. I was eager for Hans Castorp to kick the proverbial bucket. Since there aren't many people whose death I'd relish, I stuck a pristine tissue in the page where I'd bailed out and left it in my bookshelf as a reminder that life is too short for tedious books, n More...

To say that this book drags a little bit through the middle while the characters talk philosophy is a real understatement. It drags a whole lot. Luckily what it lacks in excitement, it makes up in setting and in description of characters.

Mostly, it's about a tuberculosis hospital on the top of a mountain. It's about the characters being sick, and how they each handle that situation differently.

It's supposed to be an allegory in some ways - it's got a guy who's a really dutiful young soldier, an More...

Leído desde Bookcrossing (Fer FER)

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Gracias a Fer (Anna-O) en mis manos desde el meetup de feb-08. Comienzo hoy a leerlo (ya pasé el prólogo) y me entero que viene genial después de haber leído "La muerte en Venecia", texto que leí el mes pasado. Así que en breve, les resumo un poco que tal me pareció.

Increíble.

Todo lo que relatan mis antecesores:

Abultado.
pasa el tiempo y como si no pasara nada.
Pero una sensación te recorre... algo se moviliza, a pesar de la quietud, a More...

Since I can add nothing to the body of criticism, I will just touch on my relationship with the character Herr Settembrini, who looks like an organ grinder, owns only one suit, and appears to love humanity and over-the-top rhetoric in equal measure. From the beginning, I was somewhat in love with him and his ridiculous mustaches and pomposity, and much of the poignancy of the novel comes from his idealism. The reader knows what he does not about the imminent horrors facing Europe. His appeal lie More...

This book took me no less the one entire year of my life to read. To be honest I don't know whether to give it 1 star or 5 stars, because it served the purpose of keeping my mind going during a difficullt period of my life.

On the other hand, as some other people have commented; it can become a chore; a chore which perhaps one can even grow to cherish and love, something which is safe and secure; insulated even. You go to the Magic Mountain, you know that nothing changes, in the protagonist or in More...

Frate Guglielmo, D'Annunzio e altre personali considerazioni sparse sul capolavoro di Mann

Attenzione, perché ho la presunzione di contraddire nientemeno che l'autore stesso sul senso del romanzo, nonché di riscrivere alcune parti che ho gradito poco.

Il senso dell'opera: Mann ne parla nella "Lezione agli studenti di Princeton", in appendice alla fine del romanzo. Facendo sua un'idea del critico Herman Weigand, sostiene che "La Montagna Incantata" sarebbe da inserire nella tradizione delle Quester More...

Fue un martes de agosto cuando Hans Castorp puso por primera vez los pies en el sanatorio Berghof de Davos. Acudió a visitar a su primo, Joachim Ziemssen, con la intención de quedarse nada más que unas semanas. Sin saberlo, se estaba introduciendo en uno de esos espacios de cuento de hadas, de antiguas baladas medievales, un reino élfico en el que el tiempo transcurre de forma distinta a como lo hace en el mundo real.

Thomas Mann siempre aseguró que el auténtico tema de esta, su obra magna, era p More...