The Magic Mountain

A few weeks ago I finished Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I’m not sure how to best describe what I felt when reading the novel. Maybe some combination of enjoyment, at times an acute feeling of being overwhelmed, a touch of boredom — a whole gambit of emotions, really. If you know nothing about it, the book is around a young man (Hans Castorp) who visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps in the years leading up to World War I. What is supposed to be a weeks long visit turns into seven years.

So, being a novel of ideas (and probably the textbook definition of a bildungsroman), not much happens in the way of plot. We’re introduced to a number of allegorical characters, with interesting, sometimes amusing personalities (see the Dionysian Mynheer Peeperkorn — an early 20th century Goldmember; yes, that Goldmember!); all of whom try and shape the mind of young Hans, while he, “plays king” (I feel confident this isn’t a reference to masturbation), dabbling in his new found philosophies, allowing time to work its magic on both his body and soul.

The Magic Mountain is littered with cultural and literary references, which, in spots border on insufferable. Naphta’s monologue on the Freemasons comes to mind, as does most of the late dialogue between Settembrini and Naphta. Yet as painful, as some of these sections were to read, you could infer they were used as a stylistic device — a way of elongating one’s sense of (and a play on the recurring theme of) time; on how quick or slow time moved for Hans up on the mountain, and in turn, how it moves for the reader while absorbed in the narrative. Also, I won’t lie, even the slow parts had their own little pleasures; the prose is sublime, much better than the ramblings of some amateur Tumblr blogger…

Not long after finishing I remember feeling the desire to open the front cover and begin reading again. So, maybe it’s coincidental that Thomas Mann remarked anyone wanting to have a better understanding of the novel should read it twice. Advice worth heeding. Now if I could only find the time.