The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain
Author: Thomas Mann 1924 706 pp
My rating: 4.5*
Started March 2008, Finished April 28 2008

Immensely, almost indigestibly rich, this “novel of ideas”, a ten-pound literary beef Wellington, makes Tree of Smoke seem like a John Grisham trifle. The above hopefully conveys the idea that this book is a long, serious and challenging read with very little in the way of plot to sustain the reader. Essentially the plot is as following: in the decade before WWI, a young, conventional German just out of university, Hans Castorp, joins his cousin at a tuberculosis sanitarium in Switzerland for what is intended to be a three week visit but ends up lasting seven years. Though Hans initially perceives the sanitarium with its comfortable trappings and five substantial meals a day as an indulgent country club for indolent malingerers he soon gets caught up in and completely surrenders to the idyllic atmosphere of what for him becomes a mountain retreat conducive to contemplation of the less tractable eternal questions. Some drama is provided by Hans’ infatuation with a slinky Russian patient, though the pace of book is conveyed by the fact that 300 pages pass before they even have a conversation. I would give the book five stars for its numerous witty and insightful apercus and its complete, uncompromising and masterful exploration of Hans immersion in his new existence and his ultimately very affecting transformation from narrow minded and conventional to open minded and individualistic, but I have to dock it for many very lengthy and impenetrable monologues and debates by and between two local theoreticians, one a liberal humanist and the other a traditional Jesuit, vying for control of Hans’ impressionable mind; though these outpouring probably constitute the intended intellectual centerpiece of the book, delimiting the poles of pre-war European thought, I got very little out of them.

A sampling of representative quotes:

“I don’t understand,” Hans Castorp said. “I don’t understand how someone can not be a smoker – why it’s like robbing oneself of the best part of life … But a day without tobacco – that would be absolutely insipid, a dull, totally wasted day. And if some morning I had to tell myself: there’s nothing left to smoke today, why I don’t think I’d find courage to get up, I swear I’d stay in bed. You see, if a man has a cigar that burns well – and obviously it can’t have any breaks or draw badly, that’s really terribly annoying j—what I’m saying is, that if a mad has a good cigar, then he’s home safe, nothing, literally nothing can happen to him.” 47

“You see, a man should always wear a hat … so that you can tip it whenever the occasion demands.” 52

“If someone doesn’t make sure that the best, most expensive wines are served at his dinners, people simply don’t go, and his daughters end up old maids. That’s how people are.” 195

“But we are not about to let our knowledge of what happened disrupt the deliberate pace of our narrative; instead, we shall give time the honor it is due and not rush into things – perhaps we shall even draw these events out a bit.” 318

“The liberalization of Islam,” Naphta scoffed. ”Excellent. Enlightened fanaticism – how fine.” 373

“… if left on our own without external clues, we are totally incapable of even approximate reliability when estimating time” 533

“He would sit, his watch open in his hand … [and] gaze steadily at it, trying to slow and expand a few minutes, to hold time by the tail.” 535

Naphta discourse “aimed at proving in dismal fashion that all life’s intellectual phenomena are ambiguous, that nature is equivocal and that many grand concepts abstracted from her are strategically useless, and at demonstrating how iridescent are the robes that the Absolute dons on earth.” 684

“Ideas, simply because they were rigorous led inexorably to bestial deeds, to a settlement by physical struggle?” 690