Customer Reviews

The Magic Mountain

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

To a great many Europeans, World War I must have seemed like Armageddon, a cataclysmic event that would completely and irrevocably transform the continent. Covering the time leading up to the war, "The Magic Mountain" personifies this transformation in its main character, a young man named Hans Castorp, whose life becomes immeasurably enriched after he abandons the ease and complacency of his childhood and opens his mind to new vistas of knowledge. It is not just the coming-of-age novel of a man, but of the world.

Hans is a moderately intelligent engineering student from Hamburg who grew up in an environment of comfort and leisure with not many thoughts about anything other than what concerns him directly. One summer, he goes to the Swiss Alps for three weeks to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is convalescing at a sanatorium called Berghof for people with respiratory ailments. While there, Hans takes ill as well and is forced to stay longer to recuperate, a stay which stretches itself out to seven years.

At the Berghof, Hans makes the acquaintance of several other patients of various intellectual and social levels. Most prominent is an Italian named Settembrini, a freelance writer, cynic, and progressivist who dreams of a world republic and believes literature is the ultimate unification of politics and humanism. His current work in focus is the contribution of a literature section to an encyclopedia on human suffering, the intent of which is to catalog all its causes and try to eliminate them. Settembrini has a nemesis in another off-site patient named Leo Naphta, a Jew-turned-Jesuit who advocates a sort of Christian communism, using St. Augustine's City of God as a model. These two have ongoing philosophical and theological debates, the effect of which is a battle for Hans's soul.

Hans gradually broadens his interests, indulging himself in biology, anatomy, botany, skiing, music, and the exploration of the ultimate scientific mystery, how life grew out of unlife. Other patients also occupy his time: Clavdia Chauchat, a married woman whose husband never enters the picture and who is the object of many affections at the Berghof; the malapropism-speaking Frau Stohr; Paravant, a mathematician who is trying to determine if pi is a rational number; Mynheer Peeperkorn, a wealthy Dutch epicure; and Ellen Brand, a girl with paranormal experiences.

Along with Jorge Luis Borges, Mann is arguably the most erudite writer of 20th Century fiction. I was consistently amazed at the depth and detail with which he could write about such a wide variety of subjects, from the sciences to the arts to politics. The novel expects its reader to be highly and thoroughly educated, but don't sweat the tough stuff; you can approach unfamiliar territory with the wide-eyed wonder of Hans and imbibe the ideas presented as food for thought and discussion.

Nominally, the Magic Mountain is the story of Hans Castorp, a young German man who has just finished school and is about to start on a career in shipbuilding. First, he goes for three weeks to a Swiss sanatorium to visit his cousin, partly for a vacation before he starts his job and partly to convince his cousin, a soldier, that he should rejoin the real world rather than stay in the sanatorium. Castorp gets a check-up from the doctor, learns that he is ill and remains for seven years.

Mann originally started this book as a novella parody of sanatoriums and medicine in the early 20th Century, when doctors were first saying that disease was created by organisms and were enamored with the power of the newly discovered x-rays. However, Mann stopped the novella at the beginning of World War I, and came back to it at after the war, realizing that he had a lot to say and that this story might be a good vehicle through which to say it.

After all, the sanatorium's clientele were the new rich and the old upper class of all the different countries of Europe who began the war. The doctors acted both as the leaders who led them through the insanity and the scientists who made the mechanized, horrible war possible. And Hans Castorp was the age of the soldiers, following the leaders, the aristocracy, the scientists and the intellectuals into battle.

You can read all this into the book, if you wish. The doctors are firm in their belief that they are helping their patients, but are not above shenanigans like "proving" with little evidence that patients should stay year-round, rather than leave for the summer in order to line their wallets. Herr Settembrini and later Herr Nafta are the intellectuals filling Castorp with ideas that seem sometimes benign and sometimes diabolical. Castorp is a young, impressionable man who falls madly in love for a fellow patient, Clavdia, but has no outlet for his emotion, except during Carnival--a truly amazing scene, which alone is enough to make the book worthwhile. No wonder this continent was plunged into a tragic war that left Mann with the need to write this beautiful, tragic book.

I, however, was more interested in Mann's thoughts about of life in general that permeate this book. My favorite example is the way Mann talks about the concept of "getting used to getting used." He describes it in the sense of Castorp who never gets used to the thin air in the Alps and therefore always winds up redfaced and short of breath. However, Castorp does get used to always being redfaced and short of breath. Therefore, he gets used to getting used to the Alps.

This is what part of life is. We are unhappy with many parts of our life (maybe a job, maybe family, maybe friends or lack of friends, or financial resources) and we never get used to that. It leaves us with an empty feeling somewhere in our soul and no way to get rid of it. We never get used to this problem and thus the empty feeling never goes away. But we get used to the empty place in our soul and think of it only occasionally. But it is there crying out.

What a sad thought about life. The solution, of course, is to listen to the part that is crying out rather than squelching it and to try to do something about it. But it is often easier to get used to getting used to a situation than it is to fix the situation. It is easier for Castorp to stay in the mountains rather than breathing normally.

Overall, an excellent book, with ideas that I had never even come close to thinking of before.

J.B. Priestley (1894-1984), the British novelist, playwright, and critic, declared >>The Magic Mountain<< "a novel of marvellous solidity, richness, complexity." Yes...this is one of the most profound and cerebrally provocative literary works of the modern era. Ostensibly a protracted experience at a Swiss alpine sanitarium, the novel as a whole is an enduring symbol of humanity in a pathological universe. Like other great novelists (such as Proust and Joyce) of the 20th cent., Mann was fairly obsessed with Time. Indeed, <<Magic Mtn.>> brings into striking juxtaposition the clockless time of the convalescent institution (where life is a seemingly endless succession of days) and the time-sense of the goal-directed world. The centralized point of view which prevails throughout the book is that of Hans Castorp and his expanding consciousness. By the end of the story, when Castorp has returned to "flatland," he has become a far wiser and more internally developed man than he could ever likely have become if he had lived a merely "horizontal" existence amongst general society. He achieved maturity through suffering, awareness, and confrontation of the Real. <<The Magic Mtn.>> is a great "developmental" novel but also a classical Germanic novel of education in the most beneficial sense of the term. Indisputably one of the seminal literary creations of the past century. I strongly recommend that you purchase/read the H.T. Lowe-Porter translation -- not the John E. Woods version.

I was 15 years old when I read Mann's 'Magic Mountain' for the first time. And have gone back to it (or at least re-read certain passages of it) uncounted times since. Years ago I decided it would be the one book to take to the infamous deserted island with me if I had to pick only one book. And although the reasons for this choice have changed since, the choice itself hasn't. Why? Because with 'Magic Mountain' Mann has compiled a huge amount of information (and controversial information, for that matter) and an ecclectic variety of subjects: Mathematics, Medicine, Astronomy, Physics, Politics, Astrology, Psychology, Literature, History, Theatre, you name it. Thus, the story line - actually quite thin and simplistic itself - is merely serving as a bracket to hold this immense collections of man's opinions and knowledge together; and thus, btw, the opinion of one of the Amazon.com reviewers saying that the novel is BORING is rendered completely irrelevant --- boring it can only be to somebody who has no interest whatsoever in Modern Man, his failures and his praises. When I moved from Germany to California, I bought a second edition of the book, in English, in addition to my German one --- because the German one was simply so used that it had started to fall apart...

Thomas Mann once stayed at a Swiss sanitarium to visit his ailing wife. The hermetic atmosphere, with its peculiar customs, rich foods, rigid schedule and empty hours of "the cure" was at once ridiculous and addictive. The patients lived as if they were in a kind of glass dome where even time had no meaning. The absurd and the profound became huge preoccupations there.

Mann found the atmosphere so compelling that he knew if he didn't at once depart, he'd be tempted to stay for life. To work off his deep impressions of the place, Mann first wrote "Tristan", a short story satirizing the patients and atmosphere at a sanitarium, and shallowly scratching the theme of sickness as a metaphor for refinement and beauty (like the Love-Death motif in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.) However, this short story only whetted Mann's appetite to more deeply inspect the experience. He embarked, as usual, on a "short novel" and The Magic Mountain, emerged. And a mountain it is, too. Mann said himself he just couldn't control the novel, it grew and grew of its own accord. And why not? To thoroughly (and I mean German-style thoroughly) investigate an experience of isolation and eternity, you'd need plenty of room to talk yourself out. This, Mann did.

What resulted was a dizzying achievement, a book of rich characters, philosophical struggles, intellectual foes pitted against intellectual opposites; the Dionysian pitted against the Apollonian; and of course the theme of society in the sweet snare of decadent dissolution before Armegeddon--WWI.

To give a snapshot of the plot: Hans Castor, a young man in his 20's, has finished engineering school and is about to start a career, none too enthusiastically, in shipbuilding. He takes a short vacation before starting his new job to visit a cousin in a tuberculosis sanitarium. The cousin, a young military man, is unhappily cooped up at the clinic. Castorp, however, becomes instantly smitten with the strange but alluring life in the sanitarium. He finds a reason to lengthen his stay; does he have a bad set of lungs as well? The novel takes off from there and Castorp finds a mentor in Herr Settembrini, an Italian humanist and begins to dive naively and recklessly into deep philosophical waters. Add a hard-to-get love interest and Castorp is lost to the world until a clarion call comes that he cannot ignore.

The author says in the forward that it is necessary to read the novel twice. At a minimum, I say. This is one book that can be mined endlessly for ideas, symbology, and even just to revisit irresistable characters like the good Joachim, Mynheer Pieperkorn, Clavdia Chauchat and Naphta in his silken lair above the tailor shop.

This great and literate novel is the tale of Hans Castorp, that "delicate child of life" whom we first meet at the age of twenty-three, ambivalently embarking on a career as a ship-building engineer in his home city of Hamburg, Germany. Before beginning his professional work, however, Hans journeys on what is intended to be a vacation and a pro forma visit to see his tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at a sanatorium in the alpine town of Davos, Switzerland. As the train continues on its course through the mountain scenery, Hans and the reader become aware that this is no ordinary journey. The impressionable Hans is transported away from the life and obligations he has known, to the rarefied mountain air and insular community of the sanatorium.

At first uneasy, Hans soon becomes fascinated with, and drawn to, the routine established for the "consumptives" and to the social scene which flourishes there. Ordinary life seems increasingly unreal to him; his perceptions are heightened and he becomes aware of his physical, spiritual and emotional vulnerability, as well as his own sexuality. He is greatly attracted to one of the patients, a married woman of Slavic background, Madame Claudia Chauchat. She reminds him of a schoolboy to whom he had been strangely attracted as a child. The turmoil brought on by this romantic obsession seems even to be reflected in Hans' physical state, which becomes increasingly unstable and feverish.

Events take an unexpected turn and, as his intended three-week stay draws to a close, Hans is compelled to remain at the sanitorium, a situation for which he is almost grateful as he can now remain close to Madame Chauchat as well as engage in the profound discussions about illness, life, time, death, religion, love and world views initiated by yet another patient, Herr Settembrini.

Settembrini is an Italian man of letters and a humanist who believes that reason and the intellect must, and will, prevail, in daily life as well as in world affairs. He is contemptuous of the foolish flirtations and empty talk in which most of the sanitorium inhabitants indulge and warns Hans repeatedly of the dangers inherent in cutting off all ties to real life and responsibility. Hans, however, has ideas of his own.

This depiction of sanitorium life was triggered by Mann's own experience when his wife was confined for several months. he began writing The Magic Mountain in 1912, in a humorous vein. His work was interrupted by WWI and, subsequently, the book took him twelve years to complete. The intervening events in Mann's life led him to a major examination of human nature, European history and politics and to ponder the great questions surrounding life and death. (The chapter entitled, Snow, contains a stunningly described flirtation with death.)

In this dense and sometimes difficult, though always rewarding, book, Mann's descriptions of institutional life are of interest in themselves; allusions to the dark and irrational forces that lurk within the human psyche at a time when psychoanalysis was just beginning are of interest; considerations of the human condition and of the human spirit make worthwhile reading for any thoughtful person, and for anyone entering a profession centered on illness. In the informative afterword written retrospectively, Mann states that "what (Hans) came to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity and health..."

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.

Well, I finally broke down and slugged my way through it. (Actually, this was attempt number two.) I may be way off, but to me this is a novelist's novel, a literary effort best appreciated by literary students and not by one who reads purely for pleasure and intellectual or artistic gratification. To someone who, like me, just likes to read and has always been curious about this book, I would suggest choosing something else.

The novel defies standard evaluation (i.e., assignment of three stars, four stars, etc.) owing to its scope and the unique nature of its aspirations. The text takes up about 1,200 pages in conventional format. (My copy is 700 pages of microscopic font crammed onto the page.) Is there 1,200 pages worth of plot in the book? Absolutely not. 1,200 pages of philosophy? Doubtful. Still, as the story's narrator explains, a person's entire life can be told in two pages, or a thousand pages could describe a single event. The book is in part a study of time and its measure - it does not seek to develop in the same manner or pace as other novels. To tell this particular story in the way Mann wants it told, a great deal of pages are indeed needed. This notwithstanding, the book is best left, in my opinion, to those who really like to make a study of what they read. Mann himself suggested reading it twice. (The only problem with this approach is that it would take 18 years of one's life.)

The book is excellent on many levels, difficult on others. As a work of art, it is unusually dense and all-encompassing. Almost against his will, the reader is drawn in as the main character's fate unfolds, brought about what one could call his willful passivity. The plot and character "development" are of fascinating, unparalleled strangeness. At the same time, assessing the novel's intended meaning is a perplexing task. The book's "hero" (for he is often referred to as such) seems to be anything but heroic. Rather, he could be seen as a walking advertisement for the perils of the undesirable traits he possesses. His defining character trait is stagnation. All of his second-hand philosophical posturing is merely a lame attempt to justify his disdain for exertion and his cowardly withdrawal from pursuing a purposeful life in the "flatland" below. (However, Mann - as well as many of the reviewers here - apparently really did consider Hans a hero engaged in the act of philosophical self-improvement. Strange.) Lacking a self, the hero's views and even personality traits are lifted from those around him. (Witness his shameless incorporation of Peepercorn's affectations.) The character most vocal in his defense of virtue (Settembrini) is, on the whole, not particularly virtuous himself. The character presented as the most virtuous (Joachim) is neither the happier nor the more prosperous for his virtue. Furthermore, it is often difficult for the reader to discern whether the narrator's praise for a character is intended to be sincere or ironic.

To a non-literati like me, the author's approach to his craft is often suspect. Momentum is often dispersed by questionable digressions; new major characters are introduced up until the end; fifteen pages are often used where three would suffice. Mann seems intent on presenting himself as a renaissance man, one who can write expertly on a plethora of subjects. He is not grandstanding or hotdogging - it's just the way he writes - but it does require patience on the part of the reader who may not particularly care to detour through a discourse on snake venom while trying to advance through the story.

Before embarking on this endeavor, I was hoping to be able to dismiss the standard Objectivist (i.e., cult of Ayn Rand) objection to this work - that the philosophizing contained within exists for its own sake and isn't integrated into the plot or theme of the novel. The criticism seems to be unjustified as the passages in question unfold. The philosophical views expressed are relevant to the theme and to the development of the characters who express them. After a while, however, I had to concede the point. On and on these dialogues go, completely dissociated from the rest of the book, requiring mental brute force just to plow through them. Score one for the Objectivists.

To the serious student of literature, I can recommend this book unequivocally. To the average reader - even a fairly serious one - the cost-benefit ratio here does not justify the considerable investment of time required to get through Mann's masterpiece. I mean, to me Crime and Punishment is a real page-turner, but I had to force my way through lengthy passages of The Magic Mountain on numerous occasions. I rate it three stars, rather than four or five, for (what I perceive to be) its literary limitations. However as I mentioned earlier, this rating is fairly arbitrary. To the right reader, this could be one of the greatest books ever written.

I have read this novel three times and I love it more and more everytime. It is true: this is a difficult, long reading, but it is worth your time. The first time it took me about six months to finish it... and I think that it is the best way to read this novel. The reader goes along with the main character through the most interesting trip. Hans Castorp goes to Davos-Platz in order to pay a visit to a cousin of him who is being treated in a hospital up in the mountains. Way up. Joachim, the cousin, suffers tuberculosis and must be contained in the cold enviroment so the illness is kept under control. Hans is supposed to stay with his cousin for three weeks, but his plans extend themselves as an unusual attraction develops between him and a russian woman. He and Joachim are joined by the philosopher Settembrini, with whom they talk about the nature of sickness and a supposed respect towards sick people. The rythm of the novel is the most interesting I have ever seen in a work of fiction (Thomas Mann really handles the rythm of events like no one else: how much should an event be explored or briefly described). Join Hans in his trip to a hospital, to the heights of a mountain, to his own physical degradation, to his intellectual developments. Meet along with him Settembrini, Naphta (who was based in the wonderfull philosopher and critic Georg Lucáks), Peeper, the doctors... Live with him the time when he lost his way and had the most wonderfull hallucination I have ever read, live the sessions in which he and his mates meet the world of the spirits... hear his intellecutual divagations. There is so much in this novel... I can only compare it to Cervantes' Don Quixote.
Go into the magic of the reality... the real world is magical, more than in terms of phantasy, in terms of our own minds, our inheritance and our experience of time (rythm). To read this novel is to get deeper in the experience of time itself.