M. de Dubois read and liked Lobstergirl's review of The Magic Mountain:

"This book was a very long slog (partly because I was reading other books at the same time), but absolutely worth it. Mann is a brilliant and often hilarious writer. The novel can be read allegorically with the hermetic and diseased world of the tub...more This book was a very long slog (partly because I was reading other books at the same time), but absolutely worth it. Mann is a brilliant and often hilarious writer. The novel can be read allegorically with the hermetic and diseased world of the tuberculosis sanatorium representing Europe on the eve of World War I, as the forces of liberalism and humanitarianism battle with those of anti-bourgeois religious romanticism, as embodied by characters in the novel as well as outside in the real world. But it's also possible to enjoy it at a lower, more granular level, as Mann creates strange, quirky characters like Frau Stöhr, whom we observe watching a fairly proletarian offering at the local movie theater: "[she:] had apparently abandoned herself to the film; her red, uneducated face was contorted with pleasure." There's also the regal and bombastic Mynheer Peeperkorn, whose "grand physiognomy, only just now animated with Gothic agony, blossomed with luxurious good cheer; even a sybaritic dimple made a brief appearance on one cheek." One female patient has "the face of a tapir," and toward the end of the novel the sanatorium has reached such a nadir of meaninglessness that it becomes completely absorbed by successive manias for amateur photography, philately, chocolate eating, and "sketching pigs with one’s eyes closed."

Mann's rich and vivid descriptions of his characters brought to mind the work of Weimar era German Expressionist painter Otto Dix, who had a special talent for visualizing the decrepit and grotesque and whom I might be tempted to call a 20th century Hieronymus Bosch.

I started out reading the old H. Lowe-Porter translation that happened to be sitting on my bookshelf, but the spine cracked so I switched over to the 1995 John Woods translation, which is a much easier and less archaic read. (less) "