Asdis I'd love to be able to read Mann in German. You have passed me here. You surprised me some years back when you started reading The Magic Mountain when I told you I was. I wonder if you will love these stories as much as we both loved the Magic Mountain. It was so incredibly long and so absorbing; almost stultifying, yet so great. An Icelandic book I read a while ago has one character preoccupied in the lifelong project of translating the MM into Icelandic; the old socialist spends his days happily lost in the corridors of the sanitarium.
