Can I convince you that this book is hilarious? A turn-of-the-century German bro goes to visit his cousin in an Alpine sanatorium, becomes obsessed with mortality, contracts TB, stays seven years. Is he really sick? Is it an elaborate procrastination? Is the suspended existence of the sanatorium a metaphor for our own incapacity to face life? Or for the final gasps of a doomed bourgeoisie? The interpretations are endless; the execution is flawless.
— Maddie
Can I convince you that this book is hilarious? A turn-of-the-century German bro goes to visit his cousin in an Alpine sanatorium, becomes obsessed with mortality, contracts TB, stays seven years. Is he really sick? Is it an elaborate procrastination? Is the suspended existence of the sanatorium a metaphor for our own incapacity to face life? Or for the final gasps of a doomed bourgeoisie? The interpretations are endless; the execution is flawless.
— MaddieAcclaimed translator John E. Woods has given us the definitive English version of Mann’s masterpiece. A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic.
With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War.
To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.