The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | The great novel of ideas

The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | Unforgettable Journey

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The Magic Mountain

	The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann Vintage, 1996 - 720 pages average customer review:based on 85 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The great novel of ideas

In this absolute masterwork, Mann tells us the story and the education -intellectual, emotional and spiritual- of young Hans Castorp. Recently graduated from his engineering studies at the university, and just about to begin working for a shipyard, Castorp travels to the Swiss Alps at Davos. He is supposed to spend there three weeks visiting his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is receiving treatment against tuberculosis in a high-mountain hospital. After the three original weeks, Castopr discovers he is "sick", and so he stays there seven years, the span of this magnificent "bildungsroman" or novel of apprenticeship and inner growth. It is never really clear if Castorp does get sick or if he gets trapped by the magical place.

Anyway, the isolated hospital is the perfect place for Mann to create this microcosmos of Europe and of life, a few years before that world came crumbling down forever in the suicidal WWI. In the Berghoff hospital, Castorp meets several people which will be, either through affinity or antagonism, his mentors. But first we have to mention the beautiful Russian Clawdia Chauchat, the one with the "steppenwolf-like eyes", a little older than Castorp, and with whom he falls in love -from a distance. Castorp will only have one chance of passionate love with her, before she temporarily leaves the hospital. The rest of their love will be only Platonic.

But Castorp meets other interesting and influential people. The most important one is Settembrini, an extremely sympathetic and attractive character. He is an Italian rationalist and liberal, who talks about progress, democracy, freedom, and the bright future of humankind, once it is set free from oppression and superstition. Settembrini embodies Western culture , faith in science, and progress, with a touch of naivete. Settembrini is sarcastic and straightforward, and a great creator of memorable sentences.

Halfway through the novel appears Settembrini's antagonist, his eternal (or almost) rival in heated debates. He is Naphta, a Jewish converted to Jesuit seminarist, who is a dangerous and terrorist radical. He embodies the spirit of the Middle Ages, mysticism and occultism. At the same time a religious fanatic and a Communist (after all, Communism is more a religion than a philosophy), Naphta hates all things bourgeois: family, business, democracy, science and freedom of thought. He proposes a world that is static and egalitarian, a mystic Communism ruled by the Church, and he states that the only way to reach that Utopia is through Terrorism. Settembrini's and Naphta's discussions, which have a prophetic ending, are of the utmost relevance for our time.

A third mentor appears, late in the book, in the form of the millionare Dutchman Peeperkorn. He is an old, vane an at the same time endearing man. He comes back with Clawdia when she returns from her European sojourn, as her lover. Even though he is his beloved's lover, Castorp develops a father-son relationship with this man. Peeperkorn represents the Dyonisiac impulse, the life of the flesh, the senses, and the self. Irritant and inarticulate, Peeperkorn teaches Castorp many things about life, until he makes a sad, honorable and admirable decision. I won't spoil the ending, but it makes for one of the best books ever written.

Anyone who reads this book, aside from his or her affinities, will come out of it a little or much wiser. Like in "Doktor Faustus" (which can be considered a philosophical sequel and which I have reviewed here in Amazon), Mann brilliantly explores a number of important subjects. The most important is Time, or rather, the passage of Time. What is Time? Can it be really measured? Is it its length the same for all of us, all the time? What is its relationship with Space? The hospital's isolation, as I said, is perfect to explore this subject. The other major subject is sickness and health, as well as the relationship between body and mind. And, of course, Society. Mann opposes the rational and liberal mentality to the mystic and spiritual.

Never boring -in spite of its seemingly dense themes-, and with a great sense of humor and of irony, this book can be read fastly and merrily, even though it is long. Character development is of the highest order, as well as the Alpine setting and the poetic quality of Mann's prose.

PS: Look out, near the end of the sixth part (there are seven), for a chapter called "Snow". It is magical and it could be a masterfull short story in its own merit.

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Unforgettable Journey

To read this unbelievable work is to experience the fruition of one of the most enlightened minds in literary history. From the beautiful but intellectually minor Buddenbrooks to this impeccable piece of fiction, Thomas Mann grew as a thinker with staggering rapidity and thoroughness. The book reads like a bottomless bag of delicious morsels: no matter how many you pop in your mouth at one time, you never seem to get to the last one. "What a piece of work man is," Mann observes, "and how easily conscience betrays him. He listens to the voice of duty, and what he hears is the license of passion." The book teems with passages such as this, whose inarguable truth and sincerity transcends traditional value judgements. Northrop Frye writes that art is neither good nor bad, true nor false. That certainly applies to this book. If we are to believe that the great poem should not mean but be, then Mann's book is just as immortal a poem as it is a novel. But equally as delightful as its language and ideas (excitingly rendered into English by John E. Woods) are the book's actions and characters, which are drawn so vividly you could almost touch their faces, hear them breathing, dwell in their hearts until the book's final word. And the action: who would not want to take a ride up to that hermetic but wildly sociable world of the Swiss Alps sanatorium, which seethes with the lust and intellectual vigor of of an ancient Greek tragedy? The cast of individuals Hans Castorp meets during his stay there are unforgettable, and the dramatic pitch of their many quarrels and parties is indeed nothing short of "magic." This is a world you fall in love with and would die to step into. If any single passage in all of Mann's work won him the Nobel, it is the one this book concludes with: the matured and resolved Hans Castorp blending into the violent human sea of the battlefield in what would become World War I, that epic nightmare which Mann predicts with alarming detail and precision. Ultimately, I think this is a book about being human, one of the select few that do not settle for examining a particular aspect of the human experience, but the entire scope of it all. It is a book for everyone: the lonely, the loved, and the lost.

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Best novel ever?

From my subjective insight, this book is the best book ever written. The book is really about three things: time, illness, and death. If you are philosophically inclined, or if you want a book to challenge the way your perceive time this book is for you. If you want to read an entertaining novel to make you feel good about your life...or if you are looking for a book to make you relax from your job....this book is not what you seek.
Mann is able to combine words that create dazzling imagery...especially in his descriptions of various characters and the unfoldings of nature.

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A Beautiful Book

Like some other reviewers have said, this is not for philistines who are comparing Mann to Stephen King who writes purely to entertain us. This book is for people who enjoy to using their brain cells once in a while. Some say it's too long but they have missed the point because this book is also about Time, a subject that never gets outdated. Mann never wrote formula novels, so all his books are not exactly the same. I suppose I am biased about this writer. The man was a giant. My first copy wore out and had to buy a new one.

Uneven

I definitely enjoyed huge portions of "The Magic Mountain," but the novel, as a whole, also took a great deal of time and effort to get all the way through. There are parts of this book -- especially near the end -- that are riveting: the seance and the dual, for instance, and the snowstorm was O.K. (not as exciting as I had hoped), but this isn't a page turner. It's a treatise on the nature of time and a disjointed discussion on religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis and a little bit of history as well.

Being neither historian, philosopher nor cleric, I can't really comment on those aspects of the book other than to say I couldn't always follow the discussion, and frankly, I got bored of it from time to time. Whenever Settembrini and Naphta started pontificating, my mind tended to wander, and it became a struggle to pay attention, let alone to care.

For me, and I suspect for most readers, the more interesting portions of the story have to do with Hans Castorp and Madame Chavchat, the eccentric and annoying Peeperkorn, and the mysterious Ellen Brand. Too bad those characters don't have more to do in the story. Instead we are treated to huge doses of Settembrini, Naphta, the doctors and some of the minor characters like Frau Stohr.

Something else that I found unsatisfying were Mann's lengthy scenery descriptions. They didn't exactly make me feel as though I were there, they merely made me glance at my wristwatch. Get on with the story, already!

Overall, it's an interesting story (though near the end it reads more like a series of short stories, and less like a novel), but Mann could have used a tough editor. Seven hundred pages of this was just too much. It could have been done so much more effectively in 300 to 400 pages. By the end, you feel as though you yourself spent seven years in a sanitorium, or at least like you too might benefit from a vacation in the Alps. Who knows, perhaps that's the point!

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