SIBR: The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain--Thomas Mann
In 1912, Thomas Mann's wife, Katia, was suffering from a lung ailment and had to spend six months at a sanatorium high in the mountains of Davos, Switzerland.  Thomas Mann visited her for three weeks and caught a cold while there.  He consulted a facility physician and was told that he should "take the cure" for six months.  The author considered it, but ignored the doctor's advice and went home.  He soon recovered and began writing a novella based upon his experiences in Davos.  He called it The Magic Mountain.  Mann expected the book to be a quick, brief work, but that proved not to be the case.  The Magic Mountain ended up taking 12 years to write.  The completed "novella" spanned over 700 pages in two volumes.

The beginning of The Magic Mountain mirrors the author's own story.  Hans Castorp goes up to the Sanatorium Berghof to visit his sick cousin.  Castorp is planning on a three week stay, but he falls ill while there.  He visits the facility physician who tells him what the real-life physician told Thomas Mann...stay awhile, take the cure!  The author went home, but his character follows the doctor's advice.  In fact, it's seven years before Hans Castorp finally leaves the mountain retreat.

What happens while he's up there?  He and the other residents eat five meals a day.  They sit around under heavy blankets.  They sleep.  They listen to records.  Some die and are replaced by new residents.  Castorp falls in love with Clavdia Chauchat and suddenly starts speaking in untranslated French.  How does that end up taking 700 pages?  Well, when Castorp and his cousin aren't taking the cure, they can often be found in the company of two characters, a humanist named Settembrini, and a radical named Naphta.  These two characters rant and rave and argue with each other for chapters on end.  If I were a better reader, I probably would've appreciated their discussions of transubstantiation, capitalism, pure knowledge, salvation, etc.  I'm not, though, and sentences like this one left me perplexed:

...either Ptolemy and the schoolmen were right, and the world is finite in time and space, the deity is transcendent, the antithesis between God and man is sustained, and man's being is dual; from which it follows that the problem of his soul consists in the conflict between the spiritual and the material, to which all social problems are entirely secondary--and this is the only sort of individualism I can recognize as consistent--or else, on the other hand, your Renaissance astronomers hit upon the truth, and the cosmos is infinite.

It got to the point where I started to get sleepy as soon as Settembrini and Naphta stopped by.  I could've done without many of their debates.  I also wish someone had bothered to translate the romantic climax of the first volume...which inexplicably consisted of 7+ pages of French.  I'm not sure, but I think Chauchat asked Castorp to return her pencil.  It must not have been all bad for Castorp.  She did give him an x-ray of her chest, after all.

So I had some issues with the book.  They're mostly issues relating to me as a reader, though.  Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed The Magic Mountain.  It was a long and challenging read, but I found it to be the perfect book to read in a freezing cold house in the middle of January.  I would have a hard time recommending the book to anyone who doesn't have an understanding of French (or access to a translator), but I'm certainly glad I took the time to read it.

...peering at him with a vaguely mocking look...