Music composed by Colin Sell. Sian Thomas Joachim:………. Simon Ludders Dr Behrens:………. John Hartley Peeperkorn:………. Norman Rodway Naphta:………. Something warm and tender Clasped him around the neck.
Melting with desire, He sensed her upper arms, He felt her fine-grained skin, Heavenly cool to touch. Then upon his shy lips, The moist cling of her kiss. View all 58 comments. Reviewed in December, I love when the themes of two books I happen to be reading overlap. And when those themes also reflect aspects of my own life experience, I feel a wonderful convergence, an exchange of awareness at an almost physical level as if the the space between the pages where the authors ideas are laid out and my reading of their pages has become porous and a continual flow happens between all three, an exchange not unlike the one that happens in the deepest tissues of the respir Reviewed in December, I love when the themes of two books I happen to be reading overlap.
And when those themes also reflect aspects of my own life experience, I feel a wonderful convergence, an exchange of awareness at an almost physical level as if the the space between the pages where the authors ideas are laid out and my reading of their pages has become porous and a continual flow happens between all three, an exchange not unlike the one that happens in the deepest tissues of the respiratory system when we breathe in and out.
The exchanges that take place between the two books might also be compared to those produced by the vibrating membrane of the acoustic chamber of a gramophone - since music plays such a big part in both works even as it does in my own life. Certain pieces of music become significant in both books, and are used by their authors as a kind of recurring theme.
Hans follows many avenues of study in his quest to understand himself, one of them being the lectures given every week in the sanatorium by Dr Krokowski on the subject of love as a force conducive to illness. Dr Krokowkski also talks about plants in connection with love, in particular the morel mushroom.
Proust chooses the name Morel for one of his characters, a character himself associated with the destructive power of love. The study of plants becomes a preoccupation for Hans in his personal program for self cultivation. He is particularly interested in the family of flowers called ranunculacae, a compound flower, as I recall, an especially charming plant, bisexual Proust and Mann place themselves in the text from time to time, acknowledging the reader reading, At the beginning of May for May arrived while we were talking about snowdrops They both have very sharp observational skills as if they had taken a quick snapshot of a glance, a way of sitting or standing, a way of walking, and they can stretch description almost to the point of caricature as in the case of Dr Behrens or Mme Verdurin.
He can stretch a moment out of all proportion to real time: Their eyes met.. Claudia's napkin slips towards the floor - Hans Castorp half rises as if to pick it up it - but she retrieves it, scowls in annoyance at her own silly panic and turns away with a smile. That brief incident takes half a page to tell but at other times, Mann can condense years into a single sentence: There is not that much time left in any case, it's rushing by slapdash as it is, or if that's too noisy a way of putting it, it's whisking past hurry-scurry.
Because the weather on the Magic Mountain is unpredictible with snow in summer and sunshine in winter, robbing the year of its seasons , Hans Castorp marks the passage of time not by calendars or watches but simply by his visits to the barber or the frequency with which he clips his nails - and since death is a major theme, as it is also in Proust, Mann reminds the reader more than once that, In the end it is only the physical that remains, the nails and the hair.
View all 76 comments. RIP, 19th century! What a journey it has been, following the slow death of a culture choking on tuberculosis before erupting in a communal suicide. While I was reading the last pages, my son played Schubert's song on the piano - the one that Hans Castorp sang on the muddy trails of world war insanity after seven years of slow motion tragedy. Where the Zauberberg ends, Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues takes up the thread and tells the sequel. And then Solzhenitsyn tells the sequel of the sequel RIP, 19th century!
And then Solzhenitsyn tells the sequel of the sequel in his Cancer Ward. On and on it goes, time-consuming self-destruction of human minds, culture and art. Each generation has its own Magic Mountain, and its own feverish crisis. Danger lurks in the complacent boredom of taking life as we know it for granted. It never was, never is and never will be safe. Our daily rituals can't save us from ourselves.
Invisible and powerful, history overwhelms individual anti-heroes like Hans Castorp A masterpiece, this is. One of those books that need time and space and an epidemic of epic proportions to hit you in the solar plexus and make you speech- and breathless. I was planning on erasing the earlier fragments of a review after finishing reading, to make a "final" and "complete" statement.
But then I thought that would be counterintuitive to the meaning of the book, where the passage between "reading" and "having read" equals "living" and "having lived".
The book is all about what happened before he died So here is to leaving the past as a palimpsest of the present, my earlier updates are my true reading: And I continue to work my way through the masterpiece of self isolationist literature, now past pages! Joachim unwisely broke the isolation of the Berghof to promote his military career and promptly got so ill he died!
Clearly he lived in the wrong times, otherwise social distancing would have seemed the wisest and most opportune career move, rather than mingling with hundreds of people in his military environment, exposing his lungs to deadly adventures. And Peeperkorn has arrived: a man of charismatic power whose bodily presence trumps metaphysics and enlightenment alike. What an interesting move to add a character of that type so late in the story.
Naphta and Settembrini are confused in their respective pedagogy, to say the least, and Hans fails at being a perfectly heroic jaloux. Now that is not surprising! But the story undoubtedly gains speed after hundreds and hundreds of pages of slow progress, from snowstorm to reckless valley adventure to death to naughty gaming party and Well, we all know what lingers around the corner of Hans Castorp's safely innocent worldview.
His is a world that sees the sun set on all he knows and loves and takes for granted. Obviously he does not know he is heading towards the First World War and the paradigm shift that comes with it - just like we could'nt imagine in January o that we would have reinvented our lives by March On page , I have to give a sign of life! It is surreal to go on a ski trip with Hans Castorp that turns into a hallucinatory fight against the natural powers of a snowstorm. I want to yell at him: "Why are you doing this?
Your lungs are bad already, this is going to end in disaster! And why are you taking me with you? I can't handle this imaginary stress right now. I would even prefer to risk anger-induced high blood pressure from listening to a conversation between Naphta and Settembrini to fighting the elements with weakened lungs! But I know his story is not over yet. There are pages to go and he is destined for another end. So I breathe with him and it feels like eternity.
One movement after the other, through the storm. And this is Hans Castorp - the least reckless youth in world literature! The young man who prides himself on his temperature and his skill in wrapping up in rugs for therapy on the balcony. How did we end up in this unlikely mess? Jan 18, Samadrita rated it really liked it Shelves: european-literature , nobel-laureates , adoration , and-more , humour-of-the-dignified-kind , timeless-classics , behemoth , germany , group-reads.
Imagine being stuck in a place where all sense of time is lost in the web of inactivity, a place which enables people to lead a life devoid of any greater purpose and only focused on recuperation from a queer illness, a place almost hermetically sealed and self-controlled, successfully keeping the repercussions of wars and diplomatic feuds between nations at bay. Imagine being rid of all your earthly woes of finding means of survival and all the elements that stand as pillars supporting the norm Imagine being stuck in a place where all sense of time is lost in the web of inactivity, a place which enables people to lead a life devoid of any greater purpose and only focused on recuperation from a queer illness, a place almost hermetically sealed and self-controlled, successfully keeping the repercussions of wars and diplomatic feuds between nations at bay.
Imagine being rid of all your earthly woes of finding means of survival and all the elements that stand as pillars supporting the normative structure of life during a sojourn in a special, secluded place. Imagine a miniature diorama of a society thriving on its own, divorced from society at large. If you haven't been successful in imagining a real life scenario fitting aforementioned descriptions, do not despair. You can always discover this specially constructed safe haven in a certain fictional sanatorium in the Swiss Alps where our protagonist Hans Castorp languishes for seven whole years.
The experience of reading this book is akin to a painstaking hike up a dangerously steep slope. Excuse the overused analogy but it happens to be quite apt There are long dry stretches requiring ritualistic finding of one footing after the next, ensuring that as a reader you do not slip and tumble headfirst into the gaping chasm of incomprehension.
And then there are the moments of perfect clarity when snippets of Mann's wisdom filter in like errant rays of sunshine through the drear of many tedious descriptions of long walks and repetitive conversations, making the long and difficult climb seem worth it all of a sudden.
Except that's not the whole thing - but merely a beginning, pedagogically speaking. You have to hold it up to the other half, to its opposite. Because our interest in death and illness is nothing but a way of expressing an interest in life The quirky patients inhabiting the sanatorium become mere proxies for some nations or disparate points of view, their inter-relationships often symbolic of some deeper ideological conflict woven intricately into the fabric of existence. But despite the sheer brilliance of this premise, there's something off about this book.
Something that prevented me from according that final star. Even if this remains a lengthy and eruditely presented discussion on Europe's inner contradictions, its juxtaposition of progress in all spheres of life and violence brewing under the veneer of that sanctimonious progress, as a work of literature it is somehow imperfect and rough around the edges.
Since I was often tempted to believe it would have worked better as a nonfictional philosophical discourse. It's sort of like what my eloquent friend Dolors says - 'The book lacks a soul. Read her well-argued review here The characters are employed as mere mouthpieces, never resembling well-drawn sketches of actual people with their own stories.
The situations and backdrops are mere contrivances specifically begotten to tout ideas on life and death. It's as if the whole narrative is an elaborate ruse developed to convey Mann's thoughts on the state of Europe prior to the First World War. During my moments of exasperation with the book I was able to recall a few of Nabokov's thoughts in his article on Lolita - " All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.
Not that I agree with Nabokov's opinion on TMM being topical trash but it surely gives rise to the suspicion that if you strip the book of all its allegorical significance, almost nothing substantial remains. And with the turn of the last page, it leaves the reader with a sense of indescribable dissatisfaction about having just finished a journey neither very rewarding nor enjoyable.
Maybe a re-read some time years later on in life will restore the elusive star. Maybe it will not. Originally posted on:- 31st October, View all 50 comments. Feb 20, Matt rated it it was amazing Shelves: shattering , fictions-of-the-big-it , worldly-lit , loose-baggy-monsters.
If you give this book a chance, and some long quiet hours with your full attention, you will be in the midst of incredible richness. Wise, erudite, deeply engaged but titanically remote, grand, magisterial, ironic, cosmopolitan, comic in a sly gently mocking way. They don't write 'em like this anymore. The book itself is mountainous The characters are allegorical, true, but the c If you give this book a chance, and some long quiet hours with your full attention, you will be in the midst of incredible richness.
I hated this when I foolishly tried to dip into it as a sophmore in high school. You really gotta be a bit older, wiser, more patient and more ironically inquiring to get the full effect here. This is one for the ages. Drink it slow and you're bound to find some of the more delcious textures this side of the big hoary giants which everyone already supposedly already knows by heart Dec 11, Alex rated it it was ok Shelves: rth-lifetime , favorite-reviews , Eight years later he finished Magic Mountain, which proves that time is relative by making the experience of reading it last fucking forever.
Here is the "plot": Young Hans Castorp has found that he doesn't enjoy having a job, or anything else about life, so when he ambles up a mountain to visit his consumptive cousin Joachim who does nothing but sit around wrapped in a blanket all day Wimps in the Mist Time is not a constant, said Einstein in , and his fellow German Thomas Mann was like whoa.
Here is the "plot": Young Hans Castorp has found that he doesn't enjoy having a job, or anything else about life, so when he ambles up a mountain to visit his consumptive cousin Joachim who does nothing but sit around wrapped in a blanket all day, he decides to stay. Wrap me up! He exists to listen to the debate Mann is really interested in: between humanism, represented by Settembrini, and fascism, represented by Naphta. The debate may seem academic but it has dire repercussions for your life, because reading it will make you so bored.
These two bloviating asshats stand for the two sides in World War I, and the nicest thing you can say about this book is that it didn't go over super well with Nazis. They treated Mann with kid gloves for a while - he won the Nobel Prize in , after all - but he would eventually have his German citizenship revoked oh nooooo and he'd spent the rest of his life in Switzerland and America.
He was an interesting dude: bisexual and atheist, both of which are themes explored in this novel, not in an interesting way. Castorp's love interest Clavdia Chauchat - literally "hot pussy" - is, Orlandoish, the resexed reincarnation of Castorp's youthful male love interest Pribislav. Both of them will loan Castorp what may be the same pencil, which is as interesting as a pencil can be, which is not at all. As for God, Settembrini represents science and Naptha, the bad guy, represents religion: "It seems to me you have to be clear about these two intellectual directions, or dispositions But Mann doesn't want you to actually take sides.
They carried everything to extremes, these two His point is that any philosophy taken to extreme is false; he advocates compromise and restraint. Anyway, the point is that Thomas Mann was interesting but his book isn't. It's so fucking boring. There are no characters and there is no plot.
There are talking heads with names, but they exist only to blather at each other. Almost nothing happens. Time stretches endlessly around you as you slog through page upon page of talking and talking. You look up and an hour has passed, but you're only four pages further on. What happened to all those minutes? Will you ever get them back?
Will you emerge from reading this book like Rip Van Winkle, your child grown, your spouse dead? But how long or short it is in actuality, no one knows. View all 45 comments.
Jan 19, Edward rated it it was amazing Shelves: nobel-winners , favorites , , literary-fiction. Such connections are there for the reader to discover throughout the novel, which deals not only in dichotomies, but in ambiguities such fertile ground for contemplation. But what makes The Magic Mountain a pleasure to read is the extraordinary sensitivity to the human condition that is evident throughout.
Mann portrays the relationships between the characters in sublime detail, filled with subtle emotional interplay of uncertainty, desire and conflict , which characterize the complex and segregated internal nature of real human relationships; an insight that is rarely conveyed so well in literature. The Magic Mountain is long and challenging, but depth of the writing and the consistent beauty of the prose are such that it was rarely boring.
There's so much here that I feel it's impossible to absorb entirely in a single reading. View all 12 comments. Jun 12, Lee Klein rated it it was amazing. I bet you like boring shit like The Magic Mountain. Now, if I time-traveled back to Boston that night the sun was just barely up, actually -- early summer dawn comes around 4 am I'd change her mind about me and The Magic Mountain with enthusiastic description of how the book was boring at times, sure, totally intentionally boring at times, I'd say, but shit it's most certainly not.
It didn't get going for me until freaking pages in total. Formally steady pre-modernist approach: no real structural or extended language-y experimentation other than a page essay on the connection between cellular structure and galaxies. Content-wise, every page seems infused with intellectual talk -- it's explicitly hyper-thematic, a novel of ideas in which the major conflicts are theoretical, a novel that climaxes with a confounding blizzard of argument between opposing intellectuals "Operationes Spirtuales," p followed by a sublime chapter "Snow," p in which the main dude Hans sets out for some solo skiing and gets lost in an actual blizzard of wind-driven snow that gives way to abstractions and hallucinations, like how conflicting theories about Progress or Spirit or the necessity of terror or humaneness are manifested in reality -- first, escalating into real physical conflict between the two intellectual adversaries the humanist Settembrini and the protofascist Naphta and then later on real physical conflict among nations driven to war by ideas: "What?
Ideas, simply because they were rigorous, led inexorably to bestial deeds, to a settlement by physical struggle? All in all, things seem intentionally shaped like an arduous ascent in itself. It's a novel that tries to induce a confounded sense in readers, too, erring on the side of a sort of highly managed confusion intermixed with occasional passages of extreme clarity eg, at one point there's a description of moments when the sides of mountains all around can be seen through temporary openings in the clouds.
It's structured like an upwardly undulating slope that ends sort of in open air. The language is always accessible but it's rarely propelled by a narrative engine running on high-viscosity plot. For the most part, the plot involves questions like: Will Hans get sick?
Will Hans stay long? Will Hans get the girl he likes? Will Settembrini or Naptha win the struggle for Hans' burgeoning intellectual soul? Will Hans get sicker and die and or freakin' leave this jawn, healthy or not? Thought about handing out four stars ye olde 4. Not really a book with many favorable female characters other than one sort of protoliberated object of Hans' lust known for slamming doors.
In general, felt like a month-long vacation somewhere I often wanted to leave that nevertheless offered dramatic experiences and vistas and insight.
Now I'm glad to be home -- I really look forward to reading a few quicker, easier, shorter books in a row -- but also I feel like the effort was totally rewarded, especially in the last twenty pages. Anyway, a major mess-with-me-not weapon to wield against those who argue against the presence of ideas in fiction.
Highly recommended to pretentious little fuckers everywhere, of any age over 30 if younger, I'd wait to read it. A note on names -- Naptha's name seems to relate to naphtha: "Naphtha normally refers to a number of flammable liquid mixtures of hydrocarbons.
It is a broad term covering among the lightest and most volatile fractions of the liquid hydrocarbons in petroleum. Naphtha is a colorless to reddish-brown volatile aromatic liquid, very similar to gasoline. View all 26 comments. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a contestant for the spot of my absolute favorite novel.
The judgment is only being withheld due to the fact that I currently don't have a review for Of Human Bondage , so no accurate comparison can be made as of yet. It must be said that if the previous book gave me hope for the human condition, this one explosively revitalized my admiration for the human ideal. Few people write like this nowadays. Most don't appreciate their world and its myriad ideas and o Ladies and gentlemen, we have a contestant for the spot of my absolute favorite novel.
Most don't appreciate their world and its myriad ideas and opinions, the sheer amount of conflicting diatribes created by the force of the human brain. If they do, rarely do they make the effort to take on this overwhelming amount of information and distill it down into a message for the future.
There's no snapshot of the world at hand that is absolutely gorgeous in what it conveys to the reader, both in quantity and in quality. In light of that, I now have an answer for the which-book-would-you-take-on-a-deserted-island question, as I know for a fact that I could reread this book every day till the day I die, and I'd never not find something new to contemplate and stand in awe of.
This is the well-to-do of Europe before the Great War, living off of old money in a state of pure contentment that, were it not for sheer boredom, would accomplish next to nothing. It is this boredom, this monster titled 'Stupor' referenced in the pages, that forces our man Hans Castorp to distract himself in shifting fashions that model the ever changing obsessions of the continent, from science to political discourse to religious rantings to mystical meanderings.
The institution goes through throes of obsession that closely model the 'flatland' from which its denizens came; so too does the violent undercurrent that begins to overwhelm Europe resemble the ever increasing ferocity between those who were formerly combatants solely in the intellectual realm.
The question must be posed: would Hans have ever returned to the world outside of institutional walls, had the War never occurred? Boredom may be a tiresome thing, but would it have been enough to convince him to leave the nest, where time is compartmentalized, stretched, and finally completely ignored into oblivion? Or would he have hung around till his own death, when his excuse for staying finally takes his life, and he is removed from reality in as quiet and unobtrusive a fashion as his ill comrades had been before him?
Now, take that question, and apply it to Europe as a whole. What do you see? There's a question for the ages, if ever there was one. And to tie in to the other wonderful side to the coin: of course the book can't detail absolutely everything worth passing down, but it offers much food for thought, thereby giving the tools required to take on the questions it leaves open-ended in its wake.
Either he goes along, continuing to 'play king' with his trains of thought honed inside the 'Magic Mountain', or all his questions are answered in regards to death and the end of all things.
Either path is a happy ending, in my opinion. Even nothing is an answer, and would be no more than an extended rest cure, only more final and everlasting than the others. But I will save space for further re-readings, when the fervor is once again fresh and I have more immediate recollection under my belt to spout out. One last thing: books like these are why I read as much as I do. You find a gem like this, and you can't go back.
View all 40 comments. Aug 09, Roy Lotz rated it it was amazing Shelves: novels-novellas-short-stories , highly-recommended-favorites , germanophilia. Ah yes, irony! Beware of the irony that flourishes here, my good engineer.
In my freshman year of college, I took a literature course to fulfill a core curriculum requirement: Sexuality in Literature. I was a negl Ah yes, irony! I was a negligent student of literature in high school. Only rarely did I do my assigned readings, and so I had a remarkably poor vocabulary. So you can imagine what it was like for me to try and tackle the enormous erudition and sophistication of Thomas Mann. I was underprepared and overwhelmed.
It was work enough to simply understand a sentence; unweaving his sophisticated themes and symbols was beyond my ken. Yet I still managed to enjoy the collection; more, I even savored it.
The acute joys of reading fine literature, so alien before, were slowly opening themselves up to me. So it was with excitement and trepidation that I recently walked into a book store and bought a copy of his most iconic novel: The Magic Mountain. Now, seven long weeks later, I have set myself the difficult task of reviewing this book.
Even perhaps more so than Ulysses , the novel is a throwing down of the gauntlet, a tremendous, impudent challenge to any would-be critic. The premise is simple: Hans Castorp, a likable, if simpleminded, young man visits his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, in a sanatorium for a three-week stay, and ends up staying seven years.
He toys around with ideas, he listens to learned discussions, he befriends interesting personalities, he acquaints himself with death, he falls in love, he indulges in food and alcohol—in a word, he dabbles. Mann accomplishes this feat of ambiguity by adopting a narrative voice of the most gentle and subtle irony.
Simply put, Mann takes no sides; he never professes unguarded allegiance or admiration; everything, in short, is coated in an understated mocking humor. And this ambiguity is summed up perfectly well in the person of our protagonist Hans himself, who dabbles in all things and commits to none, and who is constantly vacillating in his dilettante fashion.
Perhaps as a result of this essential abstruseness, the novel seems to make reference to everything at once. But then suddenly the novel will take a distinctly Proustian turn, as the narrator indulges in long, lyrical discussions of time, music, and the passing seasons.
We sometimes get doses of Faust or even Don Quixote , as Hans, our would-be scholar, our wandering knight-errant, trundles about with Joachim in tow, often getting himself into farcical situations. And then suddenly Dante will appear, with Settembrini as Virgil, Madame Chauchat as Beatrice, and the sanatorium itself as the Mountain of Purgatory—where the patients come to be purged of their sickness, rather than their sins.
What is so arresting about all of these literary parallels is that Mann manages to evoke them in the context of story wherein—it must be admitted—almost nothing at all happens; at least, nothing out of the ordinary. Rather, the story is episodic in nature here we are reminded of Cervantes again , and is quite realistic to boot.
Again, here we see Mann as a master of subtlety, evoking the whole Western cannon in the course of a conversation between a patient and his doctor. Now let me try to unravel some of the themes heard in Mann's great symphony. One obvious theme is that of sickness and death. Hans encounters a wide variety of attitudes towards illness during his stay. First, we have the medical staff, represented by Dr.
Behrens, who sees sickness and death as just matters of business and biology—a matter for science. Contrasted with Behrens, we have Dr. Krokowski, the aspiring psychologist, who sees sickness as unrequited love, as a product of mental tensions.
Amid the great themes of the novel, we also encounter innumerable smaller motifs. One is that of music. Mann also displays his talents in evoking sexual tension, as Castorp eyes the alluring Chauchat for months and months, just as Aschenbach observed Tadzio.
But perhaps the major theme of this novel is time. In the Berghof, time is experienced differently. Down below, in the flatlands, time is measured in days, hours, minutes, seconds. Up here, in the sanatorium, time is measured in weeks, months, years. Time forms the whole basis of their stay; for their sickness is often likened to a prison sentence, a sentence which is constantly increased. They regularly measure their temperature—holding the thermometer in their mouths for seven painful minutes—and chart their fevers through the passing weeks, hoping to see it normalize.
Connected with the leitmotif of time is that of acclimatization. When Castorp arrives, he is a stranger in a strange land. Everything is unfamiliar to him.
The reader, too, experiences a sort of acclimatization, as we acquaint ourselves with the Berghof and its many residents. The world of rest-cures and the half-lung club are, to us as well, strange at first, but gradually become intimately familiar.
How much the reader himself has gotten used to things is made clear when Hans gets a visit from his uncle. Because so much of this novel has to do with getting used to things, it almost demands to be read slowly—a little bit at a time, over many weeks. Indeed, I was almost dismayed at how much time it took me to get through; for not only does the novel take a long time to read, but it feels long.
This book simply revels in its own length. One can even go further and say that the experience of reading the novel—to a degree that is almost eerie—mirrors the experience of Castorp as he stays in the Berghof.
I picked up the book from the bookstore in almost the same spirit as Castorp when he arrived to visit his cousin—a casual impulsiveness. And gradually, inevitably, I got absorbed in it, entranced by it. I too committed more time than I expected to toy with ideas, to acclimatize myself to a strange place, to put normal life on hold and indulge in an aesthetic experience. When the reader gets to the th page, and reflects that he has been with Hans Castorp for seven whole years, and has gotten to know so many characters so well, he, too, may feel that he has gotten himself a little lost.
The atmosphere of the novel, so rich in ambiguity and so full of ideas, may also awake some lingering sickness of soul, or maybe just make us a little dizzy. And now, as I take my leave of the book, I am, like my companion Hans, thrown back into the hustle and bustle of the buzzing flatlands, expelled from the rarefied air of The Magic Mountain —a little wiser, a little more experienced, and, with any luck, a little healthier.
View all 22 comments. Shelves: read-in , read-before Impressions on my first reading of "The Magic Mountain" in Before GR I finished this over-long book and I can only say I am not prepared to read it again, even if Thomas Mann himself asked me in person. A complex book, philosophy, history and politics all mixed up with symbolism and irony.
The author plays with the perception of time and the reader loses touch with reality. A swayed main character, too much of vain discourse and little sense. I won't deny the singularity of the work, but I Impressions on my first reading of "The Magic Mountain" in I won't deny the singularity of the work, but I can't say I enjoyed it.
My mind must be too plain to follow this kind of argument, I'll leave it for others to enjoy, I'll turn to something quite different. Impressions on my second reading in After GR In spite of my headstrong resolution, when GR crossed my path, I forgot all about my self-made promises and decided to embark on a second literary journey with this novel participating in the Thomas Mann Group Reading.
I have tried to write a more detailed account of my thoughts on this second reading. The same Thomas Mann recommends to read his novel not once but twice in his afterword, comparing the experience of a second reading with the necessity of knowing a piece of music to fully appreciate each note, which will lead to a thorough enjoyment of the apparently separate movements that compose a symphony.
Thomas Mann considered music as the quintessential art. The reader is painfully slowly introduced to these higher reflections through the portrayal of the life in a tuberculosis sanatorium placed at the top of a mountain in Davos where the young engineer Hans Castorp, model of the refined and educated man of the nineteenth century, visits his cousin Joachim Ziemssen for seven days. Being helplessly drawn to the eerie allurement of this otherworldly and timeless spot, Hans ends up staying seven years instead.
My main misgiving with this undeniable literary masterpiece falls upon the false impression of the story being an outstanding work of magical realism that can be drawn from its first chapters only to witness the thick veil of artifice irremediably drawn creating a blurred atmosphere almost theatrical. Main character whose main feature is his hunger for knowledge. The Italian Settembrini : My most favorite and complex character, full of inner contradictions and existential wonder.
Naptha is the fastidious voice in the story, a nostalgic of medieval order, defender of radical extremes, from totalitarian systems to anarchism or communism. He possesses great skill in dialectic and rhetoric as any consummated sophist. Russian Mme.
Her Asiatic features and slanted eyes remind Hans of Pribislav Hippe, a schoolmate to whom he felt strongly attracted as a child. The question of homosexuality or even bisexuality is most evident in the way Hans links these two characters as well as in the silent and hostile rivalry between Settembrini and Mme. Mynheer Peeperkorn : Mme. He represents the ability to feel and enjoy life intensely, conversely to the intellectualism of Naphta and Settembrini.
In the end, each one of the characters, no matter the ideas they represent, have to face the mystery of time, life and death. Beauty is of little consequence. Time is the undisclosed but ever present character of the narrative. Time, an element of music, measuring its form and structure giving rhythm and pace and climax to the written score. Time inextricably linked to life, like bodies in space, moving relentlessly towards an unavoidable destiny, highlighting the insignificance of humankind.
This is a timeless classic, maybe one of the most influential pieces of written art in the twentieth century, finely formed, filled with myriad reflections of the highest order, irony and satire but, even with overflowing written musicality, the novel has failed for a second time to strike the right chord in the symphony which is eternally played in my plain but complex soul.
View all 44 comments. Feb 03, T. Whittle rated it it was amazing Shelves: reviews. I am not going to review this book in any serious or analytical way. Woods , Edgar Awards and many others. One of the Best Works of Thomas Mann. Hoodoo is an eclectic blend of African traditions, Native American. Herbalism, Judeo-Christian ritual, and magical.
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