Hans’s mentors, both patients of the sanatorium, are textbook examples of each stripe. Today, as in the fictional days of the novel, the world has divided into hostile camps: globalizing, liberal elites on one side and authoritarian, right-wing populists on the other. This skirmish has been eagerly talked about. Theirs is a tortuous battle between two fundamentally opposed visions of the world, and remarkably, the same war of ideas is waging now, a century later. He even has two mentors, who both strive to win over the mind and heart of their young pupil. His years spent luxuriating in these dreamy alpine heights allow him the time and freedom to “experiment” with big ideas. Closely modeled after the traditional bildungsroman, the novel devotes much of its focus to the education and intellectual molding of the young Hans Castorp.

The activities that take up Hans’s time throughout his seven convalescent years seem, on the surface, quite boring: dining on rich food, smoking Maria Mancini cigars, dabbling in an inept love affair with a door-slamming Russian patient, and (perhaps most importantly) engaging in lots of philosophical debate. The outbreak of WWI breaks the mountain’s drowsy spell and sends our “very ordinary” hero rolling back down into the “lowlands,” where he enlists to fight in the war. He intends to stay only three weeks but ends up staying seven years-partly because office work is too exhausting, partly because a sudden and all-consuming infatuation lays a hold of him, and partly through the insistence of the doctors themselves, who successfully persuade Hans that he, too, is ill and must remain under their supervision. Little did he know that he would capture some of this century’s agonies as well.īoiled to its essentials, The Magic Mountain is a simple story: twenty-three-year-old Hans Castorp, an orphaned engineer, arrives at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his ailing cousin.

Published in 1924, six years after the end of the First World War and a decade before the rise of Hitler, Thomas Mann’s great tome attempts to capture, with typical German rigor, the intellectual birth pangs of the twentieth century. But if you are willing to endure a few weeks of torture, reading (or rereading) The Magic Mountain might help you better appreciate these troubled times and, in an odd way, might even offer some solace. It is long, tedious, self-important, and glacially slow.

Magic mountain book review