The Magic Mountain (1924)

Abbandonato ad una manciata di pagine dalla fine. Forse ero troppo giovane... ritenterò quando mi sentirò in stato di grazia.

It has taken me months to read this book. I have read what the grand meaning of the book is supposed to be , but I did't see it. This is from an author who won the Nobel prize for literature and that is the only reason I finished it. ( )

Imagine hiking up a steep mountain. You are not quite winning the game of hide & seek with the Sun and it has got its fiery eyes firmly on you. Your legs are chewing your ears off with incessant grumbling. With each step you take, a wish to flop down right there grows stronger. One of these steps carries you to a spot where a spectacular vista suddenly opens up before you. For the briefest moment, the scene in front of you consumes not only your vision, but your consciousness. It is only in the next moment that it registers that the arduous climb is over and you know it was a worthwhile endeavor.

The Magic Mountain is one such hike. No other book has made such heavy demands on my patience (not even Tommy Ruggles' Gravity's Rainbow, I think). The Magic Mountain is incredibly dense and often slow going. But then there are places where the narrative sprouts wings and soars. Not to say that I didn't like the other bits of the book, but it was these few outstanding chapters that confirmed that effort vs. reward dynamic was in my favor.
It is certainly not a book with a high degree of obfuscation. Mann doesn't make it any more difficult than it needs to be. He narrates and explains everything with a lot of patience and wisdom.

The book description refers to The Magic Mountain as a dizzingly rich novel of ideas and that's exactly what it is. It is a highly erudite read all the way through comprising of many a intellectual discussions and debates. One of the frequently occurring themes in the book is the philosophy of time. The subjective nature of time is explicated in great detail. In fact, the book itself has an onomatopoeic quality, in that the narrative seems to move slow when time is not passing swiftly for Hans Castorp, and its picks up the pace when Hans feels that time is flying by.

Some of the other themes include life, death, illness, love, humanism, progress, modernism, irrationality of society, effect of war and then some. Did I say it was dense? Many of the characters are representational of one idea or another. The character of the protagonist, however, goes through a wonderful growth during the course of the novel. His character development, both spiritually and intellectually, is certainly one of the highlights. It may look like this book has a very serious disposition, but really there is plenty of humor and irony in the way Mann writes.

You may have seen some other reviewers mentioning the transcendent chapter Snow. I can't go without mentioning it as well. It is by far the best thing about the book. A beautiful, sublime piece of writing. Hans Castorp comes out transformed by the experience, and so does the reader. While other reviewers don't mention it, Danse Macabre was fascinating as well. For people living in a sanatorium, death takes on a very urgent position. Danse Macabre, literally meaning Dance of Death, looks into that very abyss.

Thomas Mann said that The Magic Mountain should be read twice. I have read through once, but I can't say I have twirled all the ideas around on my fingers and looked at them from all the sides. I do want to re-read it some day. For my next dose of ideas, I will perhaps be knocking at Musil's door. ( )

Finally read this, after several failed attempts with a truly awful translation (Lowe-Porter's). I've missed out on a truly extraordinary novel for too long. The dazzling descriptions and the intricate and fiery conversations of the characters are truly amazing. This book is a labyrinth of ideas and thoughts and definitely merits further study. ( )

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a contestant for the spot of my absolute favorite novel. The judgment is only being withheld due to the fact that I currently don't have a review for Of Human Bondage, so no accurate comparison can be made as of yet. However. It must be said that if the previous book gave me hope for the human condition, this one explosively revitalized my admiration for the human ideal.
Few people write like this nowadays. Most don't appreciate their world and its myriad ideas and opinions, the shear amount of conflicting diatribes created by the force of the human brain. If they do, rarely do they make the effort to take on this overwhelming amount of information and distill it down into a message for the future. There's no snapshot of the world at hand that is absolutely gorgeous in what it conveys to the reader, both in quantity and in quality. In light of that, I now have an answer for the which-book-would-you-take-on-a-deserted-island question, as I know for a fact that I could reread this book every day till the day I die, and I'd never not find something new to contemplate and stand in awe of.
This is the well-to-do of Europe before the Great War, living off of old money in a state of pure contentment that, were it not for shear boredom, would accomplish next to nothing. It is this boredom, this monster titled 'Stupor' referenced in the pages, that forces our man Hans Castorp to distract himself in shifting fashions that model the ever changing obsessions of the continent, from science to political discourse to religious rantings to mystical meanderings. The institution goes through throes of obsession that closely model the 'flatland' from which its denizens came; so too does the violent undercurrent that begins to overwhelm Europe resemble the ever increasing ferocity between those who were formerly combatants solely in the intellectual realm.
The question must be posed: would Hans have ever returned to the world outside of institutional walls, had the War never occurred? Boredom may be a tiresome thing, but would it have been enough to convince him to leave the nest, where time is compartmentalized, stretched, and finally completely ignored into oblivion? Or would he have hung around till his own death, when his excuse for staying finally takes his life, and he is removed from reality in as quiet and unobtrusive a fashion as his ill comrades had been before him? Now, take that question, and apply it to Europe as a whole. What do you see? There's a question for the ages, if ever there was one.
And to tie in to the other wonderful side to the coin: of course the book can't detail absolutely everything worth passing down, but it offers much food for thought, thereby giving the tools required to take on the questions it leaves open-ended in its wake. On a more minor note, what happens to Hans? Either he goes along, continuing to 'play king' with his trains of thought honed inside the 'Magic Mountain', or all his questions are answered in regards to death and the end of all things. Either path is a happy ending, in my opinion. Even nothing is an answer, and would be no more than an extended rest cure, only more final and everlasting than the others. I could go on. But I will save space for further re-readings, when the fervor is once again fresh and I have more immediate recollection under my belt to spout out. One last thing: books like these are why I read as much as I do. You find a gem like this, and you can't go back. ( )