The Magic Mountain

In 1912, Thomas Mann visited his wife, Katia, convalescing in the alps at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos Switzerland. It gave rise to the fictional Berghoff Sanatorium in “The Magic Mountain” long before Davos became a playground for barons of industry and heads of state attending The World Economic Forum. But even in that era, when people, not goods, were being consumed, and mycobacteria were the consumers, elite Europeans still formed cliques, intrigues and dalliances in the sanitariums that housed them as they recovered from an unpredictable illness. The book introduces Hans Gastorp as he visits Davos, sharing with readers his opinions on the behavior and conversations of its inhabitants. After his stay is unexpectedly extended, Hans, neither a hero or anti-hero, is seen as someone capable of enjoying comestibles ,scenery, music and cigarettes and willing to learn from what he can gather from social encounters. As an amiable passenger on a ship of ambulatory consumptives, Hans provides Thomas Mann, the book’s author, a foil to sketch character, debate religion, philosophy and politics, discuss psychoanalysis, and explore romantic desire, suffering, death and time. The “Magic” of the mountain can best be appreciated by what it lacks, what Jose Ortega Gasset refers to as “The most salient characteristic of life, is its coerciveness: it is always urgent ‘here and now’ without any postponement. Life is fired at us point blank”. The absence of such pressure frees its inhabitants, who are distant from the work, cares, children and spouses they left behind in the flatlands. Additional magic is provided by this kingdom’s impeccable 5-star accommodation, sumptuous meals, and scheduled health and leisure activities. Their rhythmic repetition coupled with the uncertainty of anyone’s future ensures that residents focus on the essentials of rest and recovery.The book, long, thoughtful and vividly written, takes the reader on a slow ascent into an upper world and its characters, and their hopes, awareness, virtues and follies framed in the global events of the era and the triumphs and tragedy of European history. At the end, it descends rapidly down to the coercive flatlands, which have been unimaginably and unmagically altered in the interim. Highly recommended, especially for those comfortable with unhurried reading and a willingness to reflect on the past and its implications for nations and individuals today.

(Not Posted on Amazon) “Early 20th Century Masterpiece”This is Mann's great masterpiece, capping a literary career that won him the Nobel Prize in 1929. (And that was in a time when the Nobel Prize really meant something and had not yet descended into being a bauble of political correctness and uninspired multiculturalism.) It tells the story of Hans Castorp, described as a "perfectly ordinary" young man, who travels to Switzerland before World War I to visit his cousin in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos, now famous for its annual winter symposium of the wealthy, powerful, and brilliant.Castorp is highly intelligent, rather lazy, and cosseted; certainly he is set in his ways and highly opinionated, even arrogant when we first meet him. But in Switzerland, he will be forced to change the way he thinks and lives. He will be diagnosed with tuberculosis himself, and his planned three-week social visit will become a seven-year rest cure among a fascinating menagerie of rich and eccentric invalids from all over the world. They live on the magic mountain, cut off form the world below and ambivalent about it, all of them very ill and many of them dying. The sanitarium sails above the world down below, like a very comfortable cruise ship endlessly sailing the Pacific but never touching land; every day is full of elegance, comfort, good food, deferential service and varied leisure, some music and lively gossip. But all is not well; this is a ship of fools, a voyage of the damned.Mann means this collection of eccentric characters to be a metaphor for the nations of Europe before the Great War that changed all of them, devastated most of them, and eliminated several of them altogether. It is not just the Ottoman Empire that is collapsing and is "the Sick Man of Europe;" all of the nations of Europe are sick in this metaphor, they are all corrupt and ill in their own way, some of them fatally, and they are all in breezy, elitist, and arrogant denial. They are all ripe for caricature and Mann has great fun sending them up in a novel that is very long, nuanced and brilliantly observed with tremendous detail and fascinating character insights.The Magic Mountain is also metaphorical in another powerful and obvious way. Each of us is dying over the span of our lifetimes, our deaths are implied by our very existence, and we go bravely on from day to day refusing to acknowledge that painful fact. This novel stirs interesting feelings in each reader about the privilege of life, its finiteness and purpose, the value of time and of each day and hour. But this is not a lugubrious or morbid book. Far from it; it is deeply droll, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Mann mines every character and every situation for its essential possibility of human humor and preposterousness, its pathos and sympathy. Just listen to this brief passage when the hero is X-rayed for the first time: "With the eyes of his Tienappel forebear–penetrating, clairvoyant eyes–he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. And he made the same face he usually made when listening to music–a rather dull, sleepy, and devout face, his head tilted toward one shoulder, his mouth half-open." It is a characteristic passage, sympathetic and hilarious at the same time.Great ideas are rolled through this mammoth text: What is the meaning and nature of time? How are the mental, physical and emotional selves integrated in the unity of personality? How shall we live though we know we are to die? How are love and eroticism similar and dissimilar? A director of the sanatorium lectures controversially and often, in what were the early days of the practice of psychoanalysis, about love as a force conducive to illness. There are very long debates between two highly disputatious and pretentious pedagogues, the humanist Settembrini and the man of God Naphta; these are the opportunity to explore deep themes like the conflict between nature and religion, wellness and illness, the spirit and the body, time and eternity, and so on. It is an intellectual feast that can be rather head-spinning. The very middle of the book contains a chapter titled “Walpurgis Night”, what the Germans call Mardi Gras, and this chapter feels like a kind of fulcrum that the book balances upon. The chapter is perfectly written: extremely thought-provoking, very tender sentimentally, but also extremely funny. After that chapter, the book rushes downhill like the speedy, thrilling and efficient Swiss toboggans that take the deceased patients from their beautiful world on the magic mountain back to the banal reality of the world “down below.” One can’t help having the strong feeling that this is very much what purgatory is going to be like: not a terrible place, but a place you would like to eventually leave, and one that is repetitive, curative, well-managed but on the whole rather dull and tiresome.The writing contains hypnotically descriptive passages that rise to pure lyricism. The chapter called “Snow” in the second half of the book, for example, is sublimely lyrical and at the same time intensely dramatic. It ends with high drama and a very poignant and moving last few pages about the beginning of the cataclysm that was the First World War. This very long book is powerfully conceived and masterfully executed, with a perfect balance achieved between seriousness and farce, character and plot. It is Mann’s great masterwork and here it is brilliantly rendered in English by the prize-winning translator John E. Woods in this very lively and eminently readable edition.