DATo
Active Member
Finished The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg 1924), by Thomas Mann yesterday. This book, as well as Buddenbrooks was instrumental in achieving for Mann the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.
This is quite a tome: my copy weighing in at 900 pages. Part of the reason for this is that Mann, like Melville, tends to be a bit wordy, and is quite capable of stretching a simple idea into several pages worth of narrative.
The story involves a visit in 1907 by the main character, a young German man named Hans Castorp, to his cousin who is staying at a tuberculosis sanatorium at the city of Davos in the Swiss Alps. The visit which was intended for three weeks turns into seven years. The sanatorium can best be described as part hospital and part resort. The majority of the people who reside there are not bedridden but most closely resemble people from many different countries on a cruise ship - isolated, surrounded by beautiful, snowy mountains and enjoying a restful life with good food and diversions to make the time go quickly. In fact, one of the themes of the book is the total absence of any concept of time (magic).
The "patients" represent a cross-section of humanity in both the cultural as well as philosophic sense. This is a "deep" book as Mann attempts to articulate different views on life and death through the actions and dialogue of his characters. Two characters which dominate the dichotomy of liberal vs conservative viewpoints are Naptha (a conservative Jesuit) and Settembrini (a humanist Italian scholar) whose constant and highly intellectual arguments eventually culminate in a duel in which both antagonists demonstrate the heart of their philosophic positions which leads to a dramatic and surprising conclusion.
An eerie phenomena occurred to me as I was reading this book (and I found to my surprise that I was not alone in this assessment because a friend told me he had the same experience) in that, much like the main character, I began to feel comfortable "living" in this environment, and like the main character also not wanting to leave it.
This undisputed major classic of western literature is not for everyone, but if you want a book to really sink your intellectual teeth into I can highly recommend it; but though the going can get rough at times it can also be enjoyably and superficially read for entertainment.
This is quite a tome: my copy weighing in at 900 pages. Part of the reason for this is that Mann, like Melville, tends to be a bit wordy, and is quite capable of stretching a simple idea into several pages worth of narrative.
The story involves a visit in 1907 by the main character, a young German man named Hans Castorp, to his cousin who is staying at a tuberculosis sanatorium at the city of Davos in the Swiss Alps. The visit which was intended for three weeks turns into seven years. The sanatorium can best be described as part hospital and part resort. The majority of the people who reside there are not bedridden but most closely resemble people from many different countries on a cruise ship - isolated, surrounded by beautiful, snowy mountains and enjoying a restful life with good food and diversions to make the time go quickly. In fact, one of the themes of the book is the total absence of any concept of time (magic).
The "patients" represent a cross-section of humanity in both the cultural as well as philosophic sense. This is a "deep" book as Mann attempts to articulate different views on life and death through the actions and dialogue of his characters. Two characters which dominate the dichotomy of liberal vs conservative viewpoints are Naptha (a conservative Jesuit) and Settembrini (a humanist Italian scholar) whose constant and highly intellectual arguments eventually culminate in a duel in which both antagonists demonstrate the heart of their philosophic positions which leads to a dramatic and surprising conclusion.
An eerie phenomena occurred to me as I was reading this book (and I found to my surprise that I was not alone in this assessment because a friend told me he had the same experience) in that, much like the main character, I began to feel comfortable "living" in this environment, and like the main character also not wanting to leave it.
This undisputed major classic of western literature is not for everyone, but if you want a book to really sink your intellectual teeth into I can highly recommend it; but though the going can get rough at times it can also be enjoyably and superficially read for entertainment.
