The Magic Mountain

Apr 13, 2013 Lance Greenfield Mitchell rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 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 Mountain" will just have to live in the pile of junk that I fail to understand.

I realise that I am in the minority, as most reviewers and professors of literature believe this to be a masterpiece, and probably the best book to come out of Germany in the twentieth century. Then again, Hans Christian Anderson's boy who recognised the nakedness of his Emperor as those around him admired the splendour and wonderful colours of their leader's new clothes, was also in the minority.

Perhaps, then, I shouldn't feel too bad about my opinion of this amazing piece of creative writing. It may also explain why English literature was the only `O' Level that I failed, despite having been a prolific reader all of my life. It just happened that the books that were chosen for my studies for those exams also bored me to tears.

Following some comments on this review, I have added these notes (27/9/09).

I have always been a prolific reader, sometimes having up to five books on the go simultaneously. I read most novels at the rate of 80-100 pages per day. With The Magic Mountain, I found that I had been reading a few pages at a time for well over a month, and had only waded through 170. There is so much description attached to the narrative that all that had happened by this stage was that the main character had arrived at the sanatorium, met his old friend and most of the patients. It had also come to light that he really wasn't there for his own medical benefit. He isn't really ill. Rather that he was there for a bit of a rest, and escape from the drudge of life in Hamburg with his guardian, and to be with his best mate. If the descriptions were interesting, and succeeded in conjuring up a wonderful picture in my mind, I wouldn't feel quite so bad about it.

Encouraged by some of the other reviews, I revisited the book, and read the passage describing Hans's adventure in the snow, as that was said to be the best part of the book. I remained unimpressed.

Perhaps I would have enjoyed this book more if my German language were up to the standard required to read the original, but I doubt it. I am not alone in my disillusionment. Several of my friends and family, some of them professors and schoolteachers, share my views, and I have yet to meet anyone who has survived to reach the end. It is obvious that there are many who have read, re-read, and thoroughly enjoyed The Magic Mountain. I am happy for them and I rejoice that the world is full of variety, particularly of taste. Wouldn't life be dull without that?! (less)

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Dec 18, 2012 Megha rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews

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
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 the next moment that it registers that the arduous climb is over and you know it was a worthwhile endeavor.

The Magic Mountain is one such hike. No other book has made such heavy demands on my patience (not even Tommy Ruggles' Gravity's Rainbow, I think). The Magic Mountain is incredibly dense and often slow going. But then there are places where the narrative sprouts wings and soars. Not to say that I didn't like the other bits of the book, but it was these few outstanding chapters that confirmed that effort vs. reward dynamic was in my favor.
It is certainly not a book with a high degree of obfuscation. Mann doesn't make it any more difficult than it needs to be. He narrates and explains everything with a lot of patience and wisdom.

The book description refers to The Magic Mountain as a dizzingly rich novel of ideas and that's exactly what it is. It is a highly erudite read all the way through comprising of many a intellectual discussions and debates. One of the frequently occurring themes in the book is the philosophy of time. The subjective nature of time is explicated in great detail. In fact, the book itself has an onomatopoeic quality, in that the narrative seems to move slow when time is not passing swiftly for Hans Castorp, and its picks up the pace when Hans feels that time is flying by.

Some of the other themes include life, death, illness, love, humanism, progress, modernism, irrationality of society, effect of war and then some. Did I say it was dense? Many of the characters are representational of one idea or another. The character of the protagonist, however, goes through a wonderful growth during the course of the novel. His character development, both spiritually and intellectually, is certainly one of the highlights. It may look like this book has a very serious disposition, but really there is plenty of humor and irony in the way Mann writes.

You may have seen some other reviewers mentioning the transcendent chapter Snow. I can't go without mentioning it as well. It is by far the best thing about the book. A beautiful, sublime piece of writing. Hans Castorp comes out transformed by the experience, and so does the reader. While other reviewers don't mention it, Danse Macabre was fascinating as well. For people living in a sanatorium, death takes on a very urgent position. Danse Macabre, literally meaning Dance of Death, looks into that very abyss.

Thomas Mann said that The Magic Mountain should be read twice. I have read through once, but I can't say I have twirled all the ideas around on my fingers and looked at them from all the sides. I do want to re-read it some day. For my next dose of ideas, I will perhaps be knocking at Musil's door.(less)

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Sep 20, 2012 Lee rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 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 like this. Now, if I time-traveled back to Boston that night (the sun was just barely up, actually -- early summer dawn comes around 4 am) I'd change her mind about me and The Magic Mountain with enthusiastic description of how the book was boring at times, sure, totally intentionally boring at times, I'd say, but shit it's most certainly not. Sure, it's so slow at first it seems like a chore, but I think in fact it's also a mountainous testament to the importance of writerly/readerly patience, more than it's a "magical" read. It didn't get going for me until 330 freaking pages in (706 total). Turns out Mann ain't Musil* -- he's more like a superintellectual Stendhal or, at his best, matches the vivid prose and encompassing scope of Tolstoy. Formally steady pre-modernist approach: no real structural or extended language-y experimentation (other than a 17-page essay on the connection between cellular structure and galaxies). Content-wise, every page seems infused with intellectual talk -- it's explicitly hyper-thematic, a novel of ideas in which the major conflicts are theoretical, a novel that climaxes with a confounding blizzard of argument between opposing intellectuals ("Operationes Spirtuales," p 432-460) followed by a sublime chapter ("Snow," p 460-489) in which the main dude Hans sets out for some solo skiing and gets lost in an actual blizzard of wind-driven snow that gives way to abstractions and hallucinations, like how conflicting theories about Progress or Spirit or the necessity of terror or humaneness are manifested in reality -- first, escalating into real physical conflict between the two intellectual adversaries (the humanist Settembrini and the protofascist Naphta) and then later on real physical conflict among nations driven to war by ideas: "What? Ideas, simply because they were rigorous, led inexorably to bestial deeds, to a settlement by physical struggle?" Overall, I'd award three stars for maybe 600 total pages of this and nine stars for another scattered 106 pages, mostly during three parts: 1) the Mardi Gras bit ("Danse Macabre") in which italicized English indicates French is spoken, 2) the aforementioned chapter called "Snow" and much of the chapter before it that introduces Naphta's horrific backstory (note: freaking Naphta doesn't appear until page 367 -- try getting away with that these days, writer friends -- also, reviews on here mentioning a certain Herr Naphta helped me make it through the first 300+ pages since it was clear that a major character was yet to appear), and 3) the riveting final 20 pages or so (really gets going on page 686 - won't give things away). All in all, things seem intentionally shaped like an arduous ascent in itself. It's a novel that knows it's arduous, trying to induce irregular, elastic experiences of time in readers similiar to those of the characters (time is one of the novel's major themes; its elaboration/presentation here kicks the crap outta -- ahem, ahem -- recent pulitizer winners** also concerned with time). It's a novel that tries to induce a confounded sense in readers, too, erring on the side of a sort of highly managed confusion intermixed with occasional passages of extreme clarity (eg, at one point there's a description of moments when the sides of mountains all around can be seen through temporary openings in the clouds). It's structured like an upwardly undulating slope that ends sort of in open air. The language is always accessible but it's rarely propelled by a narrative engine running on high-viscosity plot. For the most part, the plot involves questions like: Will Hans get sick? Will Hans stay long? Will Hans get the girl he likes? Will Settembrini or Naptha win the struggle for Hans' burgeoning intellectual soul? Will Hans get sicker and die and or freakin' leave this jawn, healthy or not? It's sort of like Paradise Lost, where their sickness (moist spots) and their actual/theoretical removal from the flatlands is their innocence, and Hans over the course of his time on the mountain must awake from his stuporous dream-life where he plays king while expertly wrapped in blankets and waxes about the stars and weighs various philosophies including one involving the supremacy of emotions over the intellect (imagined Pepperkorn in the film played by none other than Don Quixote). Thought about handing out four stars (ye olde 4.5 rounded down) but that seemed more about my restlessness not always dealing with the novel's requirements of audacious readerly patience, not to mention its somewhat underdrawn minor characters, the semi-hokey thing about Hans's unrequited love for a semi-Asiatic pretty boy in grade school he revisits with an alluring lady with similarly slanty eyes and pale skin. Not really a book with many favorable female characters other than one sort of protoliberated object of Hans' lust known for slamming doors. In general, felt like a month-long vacation somewhere I often wanted to leave that nevertheless offered dramatic experiences and vistas and insight. Now I'm glad to be home -- I really look forward to reading a few quicker, easier, shorter books in a row -- but also I feel like the effort was totally rewarded, especially in the last twenty pages. I'd recommend the experience of this book to anyone with ample patience or, better yet, anyone interested in trying to slowly but surely overcome their readerly ADD; everyone else, make sure to read the chapter called "Snow," just under thirty of the finest/most vivid pages I can remember reading in my life here in the flatlands, pages I'm sure to read many more times. Anyway, a major mess-with-me-not weapon to wield against those who argue against the presence of ideas in fiction. Highly recommended to pretentious little fuckers everywhere, of any age over 30 (if younger, I'd wait to read it).

(A note on names -- Naptha's name seems to relate to naphtha: "Naphtha normally refers to a number of flammable liquid mixtures of hydrocarbons . . . It is a broad term covering among the lightest and most volatile fractions of the liquid hydrocarbons in petroleum. Naphtha is a colorless to reddish-brown volatile aromatic liquid, very similar to gasoline." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naphtha)

* The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails by Robert Musil is different in tone, particularly, and for me was more enjoyable/superior throughout, more open and humorous, and somehow also seemed much less dense.

** Recent Pulitzer winners concerned with "time": A Visit from the Goon Squad; Tinkers
(less)

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Dec 27, 2011 Aubrey rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001-06-12, 5-star, reviewed, nobel-prize-people, translated, 1000-guardian, books-are-the-best-invention, german, ever-on

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 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 opinions, the shear amount of conflicting diatribes created by the force of the human brain. If they do, rarely do they make the effort to take on this overwhelming amount of information and distill it down into a message for the future. There's no snapshot of the world at hand that is absolutely gorgeous in what it conveys to the reader, both in quantity and in quality. In light of that, I now have an answer for the which-book-would-you-take-on-a-deserted-island question, as I know for a fact that I could reread this book every day till the day I die, and I'd never not find something new to contemplate and stand in awe of.
This is the well-to-do of Europe before the Great War, living off of old money in a state of pure contentment that, were it not for shear boredom, would accomplish next to nothing. It is this boredom, this monster titled 'Stupor' referenced in the pages, that forces our man Hans Castorp to distract himself in shifting fashions that model the ever changing obsessions of the continent, from science to political discourse to religious rantings to mystical meanderings. The institution goes through throes of obsession that closely model the 'flatland' from which its denizens came; so too does the violent undercurrent that begins to overwhelm Europe resemble the ever increasing ferocity between those who were formerly combatants solely in the intellectual realm.
The question must be posed: would Hans have ever returned to the world outside of institutional walls, had the War never occurred? Boredom may be a tiresome thing, but would it have been enough to convince him to leave the nest, where time is compartmentalized, stretched, and finally completely ignored into oblivion? Or would he have hung around till his own death, when his excuse for staying finally takes his life, and he is removed from reality in as quiet and unobtrusive a fashion as his ill comrades had been before him? Now, take that question, and apply it to Europe as a whole. What do you see? There's a question for the ages, if ever there was one.
And to tie in to the other wonderful side to the coin: of course the book can't detail absolutely everything worth passing down, but it offers much food for thought, thereby giving the tools required to take on the questions it leaves open-ended in its wake. (view spoiler)I could go on. But I will save space for further re-readings, when the fervor is once again fresh and I have more immediate recollection under my belt to spout out. One last thing: books like these are why I read as much as I do. You find a gem like this, and you can't go back.(less)

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Mar 10, 2011 Daniel marked it as to-read

"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

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Nov 29, 2007 Thomas rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 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 Werther, and East of Eden.

Part of why I found this novel so delightful was that I could closely relate to the ordeal of the protagonist, Hans Castorp, who as a young man finds himself unexpectedly confined to a hospital. In his case, he makes a trip to a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin. The patients are all receiving treatment for tuberculosis, and since most have been there for quite a long time, he finds himself in a very different culture than the "flatlands" from which he came. Just before leaving, Castorp asks for a physical exam to determine the cause of a fever which was plaguing him during his stay. But to his disappointment, the doctor finds that he has a mild case of tuberculosis himself! Our poor hero will be staying on for much longer than three weeks he had planned, and not as a guest, but as a patient.

One of the most interesting themes in the novel is the treatment of time. Far up in the mountains, completely removed from the normal iterations of daily life, time takes on a different dimension. Each day is strictly regimented to best facilitate the recovery of patients. The residents move from bedroom, to dining hall, to outdoor "rest cure," and back, in an utterly predictable manner. Far from what one might expect, this apparent tedium does not cause time to slow down, but rather speed up, since each day is nearly indiscernible from all others. Thus, Hans Castcorp learns, his original three week stay is hardly worth mentioning: up here, a month is the smallest measurable unit of time.

Besides our hero, there are two other outstanding characters: Settembrini, a boisterous Italian literary humanist, and Naphta, a sharp-tonged communist Jesuit. Castorp takes on the role of student when listening to the rhetorical fireworks of these bombastic speakers. These three men, along with a cast of other patients with tuberculosis, fill hundreds of pages of fascinating narrative and dialog. Put it on your Christmas list now!(less)

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Holly Oh, I agree with you it definitely requires a tenacious reader. For some reason I was drawn to this book day after day even though it was so dense and...more
Feb 26, 2009 07:05am

Matt I've checked this out about 3 times and each time returned it untouched. Looks daunting. But your review has got me intrigued and I think I'll give it...more
Mar 12, 2009 04:24pm

Holly Matt wrote: "I've checked this out about 3 times and each time returned it untouched. Looks daunting. But your review has got me intrigued and I think...more
Mar 12, 2009 06:01pm

May 04, 2008 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Those interested in the philosophy of illness and early 20th-century European history.

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. It took me more than ten years to finally finish this book, and my completion of it was aided by this second english translation, by John E. Woods. Previously the book was available in only one english translation, by H.T. Lowe-Porter, who was Thomas Mann's "official" translator. Hers is the version I started reading back in the 80s, maybe 1985. But the big roadblock here is that when one reaches the important climactic chapter at the book's center, "Walpurgis-Night," the energy-charged conversa...more It took me more than ten years to finally finish this book, and my completion of it was aided by this second english translation, by John E. Woods. Previously the book was available in only one english translation, by H.T. Lowe-Porter, who was Thomas Mann's "official" translator. Hers is the version I started reading back in the 80s, maybe 1985. But the big roadblock here is that when one reaches the important climactic chapter at the book's center, "Walpurgis-Night," the energy-charged conversation between Hans Castorp and an important character of the book's first half is, in this translation, entirely in French. Ten pages of conversation in French. For a non-French speaker, this was hugely frustrating. I searched all over in vain for an English translation of this section. Eventually I asked a French-speaking friend of mine to tackle a translation. He did, and his immersion in the book led him to read it himself. I did not get into the book again for years, but when I did. . .I could not find my friend's translation! No matter, said he, his French was so much better now than it had been, and so he tackled the job again. I finally tackled the book a third time, starting again from the beginning. When I got the the pivotal chapter in question I used my friend's translation. Somewhere in there, and it must have been 1996, I discovered this NEW english translation by John E. Woods, so I incorporated it in my reading of the book. While H.T. Lowe-Porter's translation of the book's voluminous amount of slang and vernacular speech strikes the modern American reader as off-putting and sometimes confusing, Woods handles the dialogue really well for this day and age. . .and he renders that critical breakthrough conversation in english!! But Lowe-Porter gets the subtleties of the book's long, often philosophical sentences much better. An ideal would be a combination of the two translators, and that, essentially is how I finished The Magic Mountain more than ten years after beginning it!(less)

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Oct 01, 2007 Yelena Malcolm rated it 1 of 5 stars 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 with me, b...more

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Nov 18, 2009 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 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 known of Mann's novels, I strongly recommend getting the Woods translation. Bless H. T. for introducing the English-speaking world to the great German, but her time has passed.

The Magic Mountain tells the story of Hans Castorp, an unassuming young man from Hamburg who arrives at the remote Swiss resort of Berghof, nestled in the Alps, where his cousin Joachim Ziemssen is recovering from consumption. Hans, initially planning to stay for only three weeks, is very quickly drawn into the cloistered, secular, routinized and navel-gazing world of the clinic, and towards the idiosyncratic and stimulating residents he encounters during his stay. Despite a rigid determination to quit the bewitching resort after his three weeks are over, Hans - convinced he is a sick man and needs to recuperate, and electrified by the intellectual and sexual stimulation he has experienced - winds up counting his time at the Berghof in years, not weeks.

What Mann was detailing in The Magic Mountain was the sickness, as he perceived it, that was at the core of Europe's malaise; in particular, the way the humane-but-hidebound bourgeoisie was stricken with an enervating fascination with ideas and class rituals, the infinite over the precise, the pursuit of comforts and absorptions and debates dangerously remote from the actual workings of the world and the black clouds gathering across the continent as the twentieth century dawned. Hans is assailed by the secular humanist Settembrini and the Jesuit authoritarian Naphta, who struggle via point and counter-point for the young man's seesawing soul. His sickly cousin dreams only of finally becoming healthy enough to rejoin his regiment in the army and faithfully and loyally serve his country, even as the lovely and mysterious Madame Chauchat seductively initiates Hans into the romantic games the resort's libidinous guests play. And looming above them all is Doctor Behrens, the gruff, bluff and blunt chief physician, the man of science who is leading society in its great charge forward.

The novel is all of this, but it is so much more. There is a wealth of detail, fascinating characters, and gorgeous writing - including plentiful sidebars about those German staples, food and music - and depth and insight abound amongst the various actions in this microcosm amongst the Alps. One scene in particular, where Hans finds himself lost amongst the ski slopes as a winter storm breaks, is as starkly beautiful and haunting as anything you will read. The size of the novel may be daunting, but the pages will fly by as you are drawn into Mann's world. Recommended highly and unreservedly - and remember to get the Woods translation.(less)

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Feb 20, 2008 matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fictions-of-the-big-it, worldly-lit, shattering, shaggy-monsters, favorites

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

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Jun 30, 2008 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: mann

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

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May 26, 2012 Peter rated it 5 of 5 stars

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

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Jun 19, 2013 Chrid rated it 1 of 5 stars

This review is designed to spare potential victims.. Don't read it if you are determined to plough through the book yourself..

The novel starts ok, with young Hans Castorp arriving at a sanitorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his sick cousin for a couple of weeks.

The narrator describes the place and the routines, introduces a bunch of characters, and you're ready for some drama to get going.. but it simply doesn't!

There's a lot of talking and thinking and philosophising- but not about anything inte...more

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Lance Greenfield Mitchell I can't believe that you actually finished it. You deserve my greatest admiration. Well done!

And thank you so much for telling me what I missed by put...more
Jun 18, 2013 05:44pm

Chrid Hi Lance!

Thx for reading my review! Perhaps I didn't make myself quite clear in my review but when I write 'flipping and skimming' I mean that's what...more
updated 19 hours, 49 min ago

Oct 01, 2012 Cooper Renner rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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.

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May 24, 2013 Michael Austin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2013

First off, I have to acknowledge that my first three attempts to read The Magic Mountain failed miserably. All three of them occurred when I was in my 20s, though, so it is probably a good thing that they failed, as I would not have gotten much out of the book had they succeeded.

Even this time through, I went very slowly through the first 300 pages or so. I was not bored, exactly, but I did not feel any special urgency--a feeling that, not coincidentally, corresponds with the way that Hans Casto...more

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Feb 15, 2011 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

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

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Feb 10, 2010 Janet rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 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 already highlighted, margins full of insights I did not recall nor would have thought of now.

Like the basic idea right now of tedium, and why a vacation is more restful than just lying around. "habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course. We are aware that the intercalation of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of times, strengthen, retard and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself."

But if it goes too long, and you start to feel at home, "As one 'gets used to the place', a gradual shrinkage makes itself felt. He who clings, or better expressed, wishes to cling to life, will shudder to see how the days grow light and lighter, how they scurry by like dead leaves, until the last week, of some four, perhaps is uncannily fugitive and fleet.'

Only page 110 now... it's a long climb up the Magic Mountain!+++++

+++++Now on page 336, continuing the climb,... currently hit a plateau with all the UNTRANSLATED french in the Walpurgisnicht chapter... where Hans Castorp finally chatting up the obsessively attractive Russian patient Frau Chauchat... IN FRENCH. Oh God, why didn't they translate the French in the older editions? It's like Tolstoy. They translate the German and the Russian, but assume EVERYONE speaks French. Good god. Limping along with Babelfish, but going to have to just ambush a francophone friend to finish it off...

That said, what isn't in this book? You don't know whether you're bored or fascinated--mostly both... So many ideas! Our hero goes from being a very conventional young man who didn't think about much besides his evening cigar, to begin to consider the great questions, not only of that age, but any age: What is life? What is the nature of matter? What is disease and health? Ideas about classicism and republicanism and conservatism and spirituality... considered at very great length, I might add.

This is not a book, it's a relationship, a conversation with one of the greatest minds of our time, who can be incredibly boring and long-winded and yet you come away with your head stuffed with new, exciting ideas. And what subtle understanding of human nature! But gawd... gotta keep moving or I'll never make it.

++++P. 440was horribly sick and didn't want to read this, it all seemed like it was coming true.

+++p 520 Feel like I've made it over the crest. The famous SNOW chapter very beautiful.. now we're back in the land of the windbags again... the Jesuit one vs. the freethinker rationalist...
++++ DONE.
The finest of fine toothed combs run over all of Western civilization. The ongoing debate between the classical humanist and the absolutist Jesuit was the longest boxing match in history, evenly matched and yet rarely really connecting. Yet the later chapters, Chauchat and Peeperkorn, and what happens to Castorp's good-soldier cousin Joachim, the surprising mystic episode, made it worth staying into the 18th and 19th rounds.
As was the case with Anna Karenina, I could have done with less philosophizing. yet this is what spurred him, like Tolstoy, to write his book--can't have your cake without your broccoli. Very glad I did it. (less)

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Aug 21, 2009 Maarten rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: patient people

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

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Jan 13, 2008 Donna rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classic-books, 1001-books, switzerland, germany, nobel-prize

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

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Mar 01, 2009 Dan Frey rated it 3 of 5 stars

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

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Jan 25, 2009 James rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, u-of-chicago, mitteleuropa, nobel-prize, bildungsroman, philosophical-fiction

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

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Jun 28, 2008 Amy rated it 4 of 5 stars

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

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Oct 16, 2007 John Wiswell rated it 3 of 5 stars 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 grindi...more

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Dec 14, 2011 Tom Cunliffe rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 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 stay of a few weeks, but inevitably they end up staying on for months, years, and even returning for more “treatment” when they have tried to return to normal life below in “flatland”. I read this book during a period of waiting of my own, and found that it complemented my own mood, giving me a bizarre feeling of empathy with the strange collection of characters in Mann’s novel.[return][return]My opinion on finishing is that if you like this sort of thing its tremendously rewarding, but even still its going to be a difficult read at times, and you will find that some of the dense philosophical dialogue will need to be skim-read if you are not going to get bogged down.[return][return]There are many think I liked about it:[return][return] * A unique setting and situation - the patients at a Swiss Sanatorium in the 7 years preceding World War 1;[return] * The closed world Mann creates with its obsessions and rivalries, its artificial manners and routines. This is a unique fictitious society, but one that is entirely credible in view of the situation its inhabitants find themselves in;[return] * The way it so perfectly captures the state of mind of the patients, their adaptation to their illness and the way they have found a community that accepts them as they are;[return] * The creation of a timeless world where months merge into one another and years pass without notice;[return] * The way the sanatorium is a microcosm of Europe in the early part of the 20th century, with all the national conflicts in the wider world being played out in this intense community of tuberculosis sufferers.[return] * The perfect descriptions of obsessive states of mind that can be developed in such situations, imaginary love affairs, supernatural occurrences, intense antagonisms on the one hand and alliances on the other.[return][return]On the downside, the characters in the novel are incredibly verbose. When they speak, they go on for pages, and you have to picture the other people in the conversations standing politely waiting for the speaker to finish before they launch off into their own equally dense replies. However, this is all part of Mann’s creation of “timelessness”, and if you want to read this book in a hurry you’re going to miss the point.[return][return]The translation is modern and natural and while I do not read German, I suspect that the spirit of the author comes through the pages.[return][return]I am pleased to have read this and feel quite a sense of achievement. My only regret is that I felt the ending is a bit hurried (remarkable for this book!), and is not entirely satisfactory. However, undoubtedly a pillar of 20th century literature, this book should not be missed - if you have the time to read it.(less)

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Nov 16, 2010 Laginestra added it · review of another edition

Shelves: l, germanica

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

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Feb 16, 2009 Marguerite rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: bailed-out

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

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Jan 27, 2009 Scuppers rated it 4 of 5 stars

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

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Jun 06, 2013 Jason rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is a young person's book, the kind of book that you read when you're in your early 20s and you think, "Good goddamn, this is precisely the sort of monolithic testament to humankind and its ideals that I would never find it within myself to write! Genius! A masterpiece!" Then you re-read it again 15 years later, when time has etched itself into your ass through unceasing sittings through other novels, sublime and shitty, alike, and you realize that this novel is actually mostly a big pile of...more This is a young person's book, the kind of book that you read when you're in your early 20s and you think, "Good goddamn, this is precisely the sort of monolithic testament to humankind and its ideals that I would never find it within myself to write! Genius! A masterpiece!" Then you re-read it again 15 years later, when time has etched itself into your ass through unceasing sittings through other novels, sublime and shitty, alike, and you realize that this novel is actually mostly a big pile of pretentious shite that the author himself, when asked as to its true nature, Dr. Eviled in response, pinkie to mouth and quipped, "Oh dear! I don't know really! Tee-hee!"
One problem is the scale, which is immense, and the utter lack of scale, which is immense. This is a young man's journey through the vagaries of life, finding a worldview, soaking in the zeitgeist of pre-WWI Europe, which that the sanatorium is a metaphor for is by no means clear here. He meets some shallow, pointless characters, falls in love (the only real engaging part of the story) and sits around thinking things that only a novelist would think. Sorry, Thom, but 'ordinary' people, which you advance Castorp to be, don't sit around agonizing over the nature of time, death, and other shit. Its monolithic nature is empty, then. Little of note is said and the bulk of the novel is taken up by insane, dogged debate between two characters who have nothing to really do with anything save as foils to Castorp, the main guy, in a supposed battle for his intellectual soul. Whatever. My eyes glazed over every time they entered the scene. There are a few shining moments: Castorp's infatuation with another patient who toys with him menacingly, though this part utterly lacks any kind of satisfaction in the end, and the denouement of the two stupid philosopher characters is pretty neat, but overall, I could steadfastly admonish anyone for reading this, unless they're under the age of 25 reading it for the first time. To anyone lightly braised and seasoned by life, the entire affair will come across as an exercise in banal look-at-me intellectualist poopie. (less)

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Jun 06, 2013 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, fiction

I read The Magic Mountain somewhere around the age of seventeen. I was flummoxed by the French (my own education, now long forgotten in this realm of human knowledge, was more along the lines of being able to ask for a lemon ice cream or which platform the train would depart from and so was not up to understanding intimate conversations between characters in a novel) but not put off enough because I then went on to read Doctor Faustus a couple of years later and then Joseph and his Brothers in t...more

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Jan 26, 2013 Faedyl rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Leído desde Bookcrossing (Fer FER)

////////////////////////////
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

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