The Magic Mountain
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Published in 1924, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain follows Hans Castorp, a young German engineer who travels to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim. What begins as a three-week stay gradually becomes an immersion in a strange, self-contained world, where time loses its ordinary meaning and illness, desire and mortality shape the rhythms of daily life. Among the patients and visitors, Hans encounters two formidable intellectual adversaries: the humanist Settembrini and the radical Jesuit Naphta, whose spirited debates expose the political and philosophical divisions of Europe.
Set on the eve of the First World War, the novel transforms the sanatorium into a miniature portrait of a civilisation approaching catastrophe. Mann explores the nature of time, the conflict between reason and irrationality, the seductions of illness, and the uneasy relationship between intellectual freedom and political conviction. Both an intricate novel of ideas and a deeply ironic portrait of European bourgeois society, The Magic Mountain stands among the defining achievements of twentieth-century Modernism. It also occupies a central place in Mann’s work, extending the preoccupations with sickness, art and moral decay first explored in Death in Venice.
From the book
“Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets when a new month or year begins.”
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
On The Magic Mountain
“A strange fantasy: absurd yet profound.”
— David Treuer, The New York Review of Books