The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | Death and Amusement in the Mountains

The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | A great book but not for flatlanders

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The Magic Mountain

	The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann Vintage, 1996 - 720 pages average customer review:based on 84 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

Death and Amusement in the Mountains

The Magic Mountain is a renowned classic of twentieth century literature, especially German and European literature. As a book, it is moderate to easy to read, and I highly recommend the novel. It is easier to read than some of Mann's other works. I recently purchased and read this exact novel as shown.

The novel is set near Davos, Switzerland, just before the outbreak of World War I. The story was inspired by Mann's own visit to a clinic in Davos when his wife was admitted to a similar clinic when she was suffering from a lung ailment.

Without giving away the plot, the story is about a young man, Hans Castorp who comes to the mountain clinic for a brief visit to see a relative, a man of a similar age, who is a patient. He becomes caught up in clinic life. Mann uses his stay at the clinic as a vehicle to explore issues of European bourgeois society, including the destructiveness of the society as a whole. Mann presents a story with six main characters who discuss, debate, or represent various aspects of morality and behavior including health, illness, sexuality and religion. At an earlier time, Mann had planned on making the book a short satire, but he changed his mind and developed it into a full novel - which has become a masterpiece - and not difficult to read compared with some of Mann's other works.

The patients are cut off from civilization, or what the patients call the "flatlands" in the book. They are living in their own small world and are fed sumptuous meals along with wines many times a day. Between the meals, they meet, they leave the clinic and go on walks, they have discussions and sometimes flirt. Isolated as they are, they live in a magic and artificial world surrounded by the natural beauties and the wonders of the Swiss mountains. The weather in Davos lacks sharp seasonal changes. It can snow in the summer; and, in the unchanging weather and repetitive daily routine they lose the feeling for time and they lose their perspectives.

Without giving away the plot, Castorp, comes for a short stay of three weeks to visit his cousin. With a degree of foreboding, he stays on. He develops a secret lust after a fellow patient, a Russia woman, Madame Chaucat, who is married but whose husband is far away. Of the six main characters, Clavdia Chauchat represents erotic temptation and lust. Castorp and his cousin represent the values of current pre-World War I German society.

He engages in conversations with fellow patients, and among them he is regarded as a proper German man with the German reservations and morality. Outside the clinic, they take walks where he becomes friends with Settembrini, an Italian, who is a liberal, a humanist, a supporter of the democratic ideals, and morality. Settembrini comes into conflict with Naphta, the fifth main character, who represents the forces of decay, of radicalism and extremism. fascism, anarchism, and communism. The story is complicated by a sixth character, Mynheer Peepercorn, who enters towards the end of the story.

Added to all of this is Mann's own love of music which he mixes in near the end, plus surprisingly for the reader, a touch of the supernatural, which actually spoils the book a bit.

This is a highly entertaining and worthwhile read.

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A great book but not for flatlanders

Anyone who is preoccupied with the cares of the "flatland", who lives busily working away with the sense that everything will keep humming along indefinitely, will find this book a waste of time. The main character, Hans Castorp, takes leave of his life in the lowlands of northern Germany at first on a vacation, but then due to a lingering illness stays on at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland for what turns out to be an ominous seven years: the time leading up to the outbreak of World War I. From a life of comfort and security, in which he follows the well-defined and socially-acceptable track of becoming an Engineer, he finds himself transported with an unknown future to a rarefied mountain world, in which death is stalking.

The narrative moves briskly at the beginning, much like I remember BUDDENBROOKS, but soon the author gets into a different kind of territory and sabotages the running narrative by lengthy descriptions. At one point, he takes almost an entire page to describe Hans taking his temperature (in keeping with the theme of time). What drew me into this descriptive style concerned the events as they unfolded: certainly, Hans's attraction to Clavdia Chauchat, the fate of his cousin Joachim, the doings of the patients at the sanatorium in the face of death; and especially, the perceptive way of the author in noting all those personal concerns that are often skipped over in the usual rush and roar of everyday life.

On one level, this book is about the education of Hans Castorp - an education all-together different from what he would get in the flatland. We get introduced to the long-winded discourse of Settembrini, the secular humanist ; and as a counterpoint, Naphta and his incessant arguments defending the authoritarianism of the Church. These two represent the European conflict between the legacy of the Greeks and the religion imported from the deserts of the Levant. They, along with others such as Rhadamanthus and Peeperkorn, more closely resemble operatic characters than actual flesh and blood characters. They engage more in soliloquies than dialogue, and they confront and challenge Hans.

On a deeper level, Hans can be seen as embarking upon a spiritual quest, which is certainly unlike the material quest that he was following in the flatland. The quest for the Holy Grail in Western Mythology is a quest that can only be undertaken by a unique individual on a path not traveled ever before by anyone else, by the most difficult of possible ways. Hans is as Settembrini calls him: "the delicate child of life". But he is tested in his own way by the very immediate presence of death and disease; and he is also tested when he gets lost in a snowstorm.

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Unique in reading experiences

Just to be clear, I've only read the Lowe-Porter translation, though I plan at some point to follow Mann's advice and give it a once-again with the new Woods version. For those not accustomed to fairly dense or philosophical works of fiction, the task here presented to the reader will likely prove new and exciting. I'm not going to say "difficult" or "intimidating" because, with a bit of patience and intelligence, the novel is accessible and even enjoyable in a certain idiosyncratic way.

The Lowe-Porter translation is certainly worth the time as long as one is willing to entertain the idea of paragraph-length sentences and multi-clause complexes loaded with such devices as are available to the would-be Germanizer of the English language: commas, dashes, semicolons, ellipses... mostly the first two. The translation also deftly utilizes an impressive vocabulary, and I kept a pen and pad handy with a dictionary to take notes and learn new native words from a novelist whose second language is my first. Above all--and I have come to this opinion after having worked my way through the book carefully and slowly and, in all sincerity, with great enjoyment--reading Thomas Mann will make you a better writer and thinker. The same probably goes for many of the great works of literary fiction, but here is a modern author whose imagination and love for ideas and abstraction I find very dear to my own intellectual sentiments.

As far as accessibility, an introductory knowledge of Nietzsche is extremely helpful in particular. Schopenhauer's influence shows itself clearly in the concern for time and the subjectivity of its experience, but I believe Nietzsche's ideas are very nearly more pervasive on the whole. They also have less to do with the aesthetics of the novel and more with its content, meaning that their potential for distracting the unsuspecting reader and detracting from his or her sense of literary enjoyment becomes a real issue. That being said, the back-and-forth between Settembrini and Naphta is intellectually engaging, particularly for those with a background or interest in German philosophy. Fortunately, Mann saves the novel from suffocating in this kind of mental gymnastic by interspersing predominately narrative chapters--lulls in the intellectual hyper-articulation surrounding some of the main characters.

Who should read this book? I'm not entirely sure... nearly everyone who garners an interest I suppose. I hesitate to call the novel "modernist" in contradistinction to "post-modernist" because the intellectual motifs revolve so dependently around Nietzschean concerns. The issue of life and death, for instance--whether death is an absolute negation or something positive and life-worthy--is reminiscent of Nietzsche's dialectical approach to the same issue. Undoubtedly Nietzsche (and perhaps Mann himself) often assumes the enlightenment, progressive, bourgeois-liberal side manifested in Settembrini. But some aspects don't match up: Nietzsche wasn't liberal or progressive, and decried the bourgeois values of his time. In some ways, S. and Naphta seem to represent two unacceptable oppositions of a dualism, some kind of Nietzchean inspired set of polarities designed for the purposes of philosophical dialogue.

In the end, however, I believe Nietzsche and Mann would come down qualifiedly on the side of Settembrini. This seems fairly obvious by the conclusion of the novel, though the introduction of Peeperkorn is another issue altogether: a character we the reader learn both to love and hate. A character whose physical presence and prowess inspire a certain awe but whose skill in articulation shrivels in comparison to the above mentioned antagonists, Peeperkorn is at once personally fascinating and intellectually repulsive. Though I found myself repeatedly sympathizing with Settembrini in Peeperkorn's presence, I could at most blindly affirm the former's academic optimism in the face of the child-like carelessness that is Peeperkorn. Is Peeperkorn really Nietzche's mature vision of the Dionysian principle? The idea changed in Nietzche's thought, later to emerge as something closer to the intellectual maturity represented by Settembrini. On this account, I can only dismiss Peeperkorn as too unrealistic and unconcerned, or perhaps merely too lacking in a mature and universal humanistic spirit.

Whatever one's interpretation, the book is the ultimate in fictional food for thought. I believe it is also tremendously enjoyable to a certain kind of intellectual sentiment: philosophical, conceptual, abstract, patient and slow moving, perhaps a little pessimistic. I recommend without much reservation the Lowe-Porter translation, not as a substitute for Woods but as a work of creative literary articulation in itself.

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