The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann


My rating: 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 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.

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