The Magic Mountain

A book replete with ideas, Mann is a craftsmen in creating an environment that constantly verges on the absurd and the real. As we follow Hans Castorp we are introduced to situations and characters that resemble a Studio Ghibiri film and ideas that must've been widely discussed during the intellectual ferment that precipitated the Great War. Given Mann's revision of the novel following the catastrophe, we can witness Mann's critique of the hubris that pervaded Europe's intellectual elite and educated middle class. It reminds one of Hesse in his condemnation of the ‘bourgeoisie' but in Mann's sense it feels more like a pointed attack on how self indulgent intellectual babble can be meaningless and pernicious enough to condemn millions of men to their death. Whenever Mann paints an image of the sanatorium and its zanny character's, it invokes a surrealism, a strange blend of reality and dreamscape; time feels distorted, the weather defies seasonal convention, people behave strangely in public and no one bats an eye. There are times when the novel carries on, Mann seems to enjoy verbosity and it is hard not to feel like he's doing it for humours sake. But I enjoyed it. It's funny when someone describes at length a year as being a complicated arrangement of the earth orbiting the sun. The final chapter tied everything together. In contrasting the brutality of WWI with our bashful ‘good engineer' and his playful residence, one can appreciate the tragedy of idealism crushed by reality. How the self-assured, overconfident middle class and their abstract ideas on politics, society and philosophy could cause a militarism that resulted in unprecedented violence. Perhaps there is a moral in The Magic Mountain that is relevant to our times. As a newbie to German literary classics, this book makes me want to dig deeper into the canon, I loved it.

A true journey in every sense of the word, with a masterful sense of pacing and style. I feel like it opened a portal to a sort of zeitgeist pre-WWI that allowed me to grasp at least a grain of what the typical european civilian experienced. Personally loved how the narrator treated the main character like a guinea pig they inserted into experiments and how they'd make jovial mocking remarks about him. It made the narrator a character too, that you could converse with, who you were in on a joke with. Very cool.