I first read, “The Magic Mountain,” when I was a teenager and still recall the magical feeling I received when I had finished. However, I had no doubt that much of the novel had passed me by, at such a young age, and so thought I would like to re-visit it. Having read it for the second time, more than thirty years apart, I am still aware that there was much, especially among the long, philosophical discussions, that I probably didn’t really get. However, the magic is still, most certainly, there.
Thomas Mann started writing this novel in 1912, but it was not finished, or published, until 1924. Obviously, this work was interrupted, and vastly changed, by WWI and led Mann to reflect on European society. Mann, himself, suggested that you need to read this book first and you certainly do feel that it is a novel which will stay with you and that it has many, many themes to reflect upon: obviously, illness and death (this is set in a sanatorium after all), a sense of being separate and apart from the world, time, love, desire, humanism, radicalism, and duty, best represented by Joachim Ziemmsen.
It is Ziemmsen, a young soldier, who is originally resident at the Berghof, when his cousin, Hans Castorp, comes to visit him. What begins as a short visit, with his idea of staying merely weeks, laughed at by those who measure time in months, at the shortest, is gradually extended into months and then years. Hans is young, innocent, eager to experience everything and yet, indolent enough to embrace the languid, comfortable world of the Berghof. Yet, although the sanatorium appears to visitors as an isolated world of comfort and privilege, there is, undoubtedly, real illness and death behind closed doors.
Thomas Mann manages to convey complex and difficult ideas, but he never forgets that he is creating a novel, and maintains the storyline of the TB sanatorium and of the inhabitants who live, and work, there. A novel is, essentially, about its characters, and you do care about what happens to those who appear within the pages of this huge novel, as Mann weaves a world of ideas, characters and themes, which not only highlight events leading to the first world war, but suggest political ideas leading to the second. I have a feeling this is a novel I will come back to again, later in my life, and gain more from every time I do read it.
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Reviews with images
Not recomended
Poor bound and print. The text is so small you cannot even read it... I have asked for a refound and they gave me the money back.
Top reviews from other countries
Herman Rosen HERMAN ROSEN
A TRUE CLASSIC
Reviewed in the United States on 14 August 2021Shiva
I bought second hand, great package and copy
Reviewed in India on 13 January 2021ALLAN WARNKE
I have earlier editions of truly one of the great books describing Germany a century ago and needed a ...
Reviewed in Canada on 8 April 2017