The Magic Mountain
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Worth the effort? Your thoughts on the value of The Magic Mountain.
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Elizabeth, I wouldn't pick up The Magic Mountain again without the intent to really complete it. Don't know if that'll happen. So many other works are still calling me! Sad truth is there are too many to read and not enough time.
I wish I understood the connection between Narnia and Magic Mountain. Perhaps sliding bodies down hills in wardrobes--i just don't see any connection at all, but that's just me,
Markdine, what I was saying was that reading a book--any book--that you read as a younger person, will give you much more insight into it. That's all; there's no real connection beyond an 18 year old reading Narnia after 8 years and suddenly realizing that Aslan represents (or is) Jesus. If you try reading those classics you mentioned you read years ago, you might find a great deal more in them than you had originally imagined.
My bad, Elizabeth. Corey: I'm not an apologist for Mann: Sledgehammer says it. Few were more conflicted than old Thomas.
In my top five favorite books. (Along with Humboldt's Gift and Housekeeping, others are fluid.) I think I dog-eared half the pages. I read it maybe seven years ago and thought of it often while watching Breaking Bad--the notion of sickness giving license to drop societal norms of good behavior, or using sickness as an excuse to do so. Considering a re-read. Great stuff.
Glad I didn't read it in school where we talked about characters representing countries or any of that. Ick. No wonder Harold Bloom loses his mind over the current state of literary education/critique.
I loved the book -although I read it, many years ago, when I was convalescing from an illness. You have to be patient with book but once you find the author's rhythm, it is beguiling and beautiful.
I'm sure I missed a lot of the European resonances the first time of reading it in my 20s or 30s! Maybe a good book to re-read in my 60s!My memory of it is of Mann's rich evocation of the sanatorium and the cerebral worlds of the patients there.
I've read this book 5 or 6 times and will continue to read it. I don't consider myself a heavyweight in the slightest but I just float through the pages. I suppose I just happen to be dialed in on the proper frequency here. Far and away my favorite book!
Like many of the others who have commented, I read the book many, many years ago in college. The prof seemed to focus on Mann's destruction of time in the book. Years later, I read that book was actually begun prior to WWI and the characters represented competing streams of thought in Europe at that time. From an historical perceptive, it is fascinating to see an artist, a thinker foretell how the Western world could enter a 40 year period of cataclysmic wars that many historians still can't explain the rationale.
Feliks wrote: "Its long been regarded as the single best European novel of the Twentieth Century. I am aware of no reason to stop considering it as such. The richly competitive time-and-place which saw its advent..."Very well put! Thank you!
It is not effort it is enjoyment.
Actually, this is my favourite book, which I intend to read at least one more time. It convinced me that it had deserved the time spent by the author for the process of writting it. I really appreciated the discussions between 2 characters, which were not only quite informative, but also giving a lot of details about the humanism and so on. Even if the novel is a little bit static, I would name it a book which has the power to illustrate the desease and that unknown space for us as another world, maybe a superior one.It also stimulates the intellectual thinking.
The Magic Mountain is a coming-of-age book for a certain kind of kid. More the kind of Hans and less of Joachim, though every kid should be granted their (extended) ‘Mountain-time’. You go up the mountain as a kid and you come down it a bit more prepared for life in the valley. A kid should be so lucky as to spend a while in such an excellent company of educators. If you lack the optimism and passion of a Settembrini then you’re a cold harted cynic. If you don’t at least posess a whiff of Naphta’s cynicism then you’re a naive dreamer. Hans walks right in the middle of them most of the time. Then Mdme Chauchat appears on the scene and love leaves the intellectuals chattering away in the remote distance. We need our time on the mountain, and like childhood you wish it would never stop, but you’ll have to eventually go down and face the music.
Thomass Mann took a 12-year break in the process of writing The Magic Mountain in which he wrote the essay ‘Confessions of an Unpolitical Man’. In this process of self-evaluation he arrives at the conclusion that the way (German) high culture had seperated itself from the world of real politics, floating around in lofty atmospheres of an idealized Goethian Elysium, is one of the causes of the outbreak of the Great War and the later rise of fascism. In other words: for the collapse of civilization. He called it ‘Weltentzweiung’. Politics and culture should not be separated but should inform one-another in a process of constant conversation. A lot had been lost since the days of Schiller and German Idealism. A lot might have been different if only the German cultural elite wouldn’t have looked down on the democratic masses so condescendingly.So the book also reflects Mann’s own process of (self-)re-education.
The context of The Magic Mountain seems to be at least as important as the work itself. That makes it a classic with a message which may still be valid in our own day and age.
The way Mann relates the stories of his characters in The Magic Mountain , the long and meandering sentences, reflect how people in the upper echelons of society used to talk - or wished they would have! - in those days of Bürger-bildungstum in Germany in the early 20th century, I imagine.
The book made me think about language, about to what extend language facilitates or obstructs (proper?) thinking. The loss of the style of language and way of thinking that is represented in The Magic Mountain was already mourned over as ‘a lost world of the spirit’ by the time my (Dutch) translation of the book appeared in 1970. With Hans Castorp, Thomas Mann sends that world of the spirit into the trenches of WWI a long time before that, and at the same time raises a monument for it so it can be remembered by future generations. That‘ll be us!
I could write a reflection on The Magic Mountain every week, and every week it would be different. That’s what defines a true classic: you always carry it with you and it never ceases to make you think.
I really wanted to like this book as so many people I admire talk about it like it's the perfect novel. I got about 100 pages in and couldn't continue..I just didn't see the point. I rarely don't finish books but I just couldn't invest any more time in reading Magic Mountain.
Certainly a challenging read at times, but it's one of my favorites, and among the very few that resonated so strongly with me that I was genuinely upset when I finished it.
Mann warns the reader that this will take time. Mann needs time to create a certain atmosphere for his best scenes, you can't rush the mood otherwise it won't work. It takes time to rise above kitsch.
The Only thing i can add is that book worth reading... One can simply notice how much profound author's knowledge in various fields... how much wealthy is vocabulary he uses in any subject.. Different characters living in sanatorium , every one has its own story lines that makes them memorable, catchy...Eventually this is a novel that gives you more than you expect.
In my reading of The Magic Mountain, I found myself enthralled with his descriptions of the Swiss landscape, its seasonal changes and its impact on the characters. That drove me through the slower times when he, rather laboriously for my taste, explored the life philosophies of the characters. My two cents.
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Here's what I mean: one of my HS seniors volunteered this in class. His ten year old brother was reading The Chronicles of Narnia and Mason decided to reread them along with him. "I never realized Aslan was Jesus!" he exclaimed; "I totally missed that when I was a kid!"