About this title: Hans Castorp visits his tubercular cousin Joachim at a sanitarium in Switzerland. While there, he too is diagnosed with the disease, and his brief visit stretches to a stay of seven years. He leaves only when World War I is declared and he returns to Germany to fight. The novel is a classic Bildüngsroman: Hans evolves from a confused and directionless young bourgeois into an intellectual who understands the meaning of life and death.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books, Great Britain
Date Published: 1960
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Cover shows only minor wear with small tears & creased corners; pages appear unmarked, moderately tanned. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: New York: Vintage International
Date Published: 1992
ISBN-13:9780679736455ISBN:067973645X
Description: Good in Good jacket. Name inside cover. Cover shows some wear or creases. Pages yellowed/tanned. No highlighting or underlining. You're gonna love this book! read more
Description: Good. B000OLK708 Hardcover with no DJ, moderate shelf-wear, rubbing, fraying, fading, foxing, smudges, stains, chipping and bumping on board surfaces, edges, corners, and spine. Binding is tight and square. Inside pages are free from underlining, note taking, and/or highlighting. Book is in stock and ready to ship same or next business day. Select Expedited shipping and receive your book within 3-5 business days. Buy with confidence! Please leave feedback after your purchase. It helps other ... read more
Binding: Cloth
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Date Published: 1946
Description: Good. No Jacket. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. THIRD PRINTING. Spine is beginning to loosen and cloth at spine has seperated at the back. Clean book with very clean text. General wear and bumping to cover. read more
Description: Very Good. B000SXYBIG See my pictures. Tight and clean. No marks or creases except library stamps and pocket. Dust jacket has heavy chipping and edge wear. We ship no later than next business day. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 1939-01-01
Description: Fair. Hardcover, no dust jacket. Acceptable to Good. Cover shows moderate wear to edges, corners and spine tips. Spine is sun-faded. Front endpaper has few markings from previous onwer, no other pen or pencil makrigns. Pages are very lightly sunned to edges, few have age spots. Last 15 pages are dog-earred at top. Text block is shaken, hinges are solid, pages are bound tight. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: New York: Vintage International
Date Published: 1992
ISBN-13:9780679736455ISBN:067973645X
Description: Good. Text pages clean & tight with no markings or highlighting. Cover has scattered scratches & exterior page edges lightly tanned. Some shelf wear along edges Name of former owner inside. A paean to the bygone way of life of the European bourgeoisie in the days before WWI. Still a very readable copy. read more
Edition: English Translation
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, NY
Date Published: 1928
Description: Fair. No Jacket. English translation of this historic novel, by the Nobel laureate, Thomas Mann. Binding is cocked; moisture mark on botton right corner of cover and all pages; minor wrinkling of cover. read more
"Thomas Mann was a genius, and one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century. I originally read most of his works through the H. T. Lowe-Porter translations, which, though elegant and literary in their own right, took several liberties with Mann's ideas, subtleties, and humor. I have been grabbing up the newer translations by John E. Woods which, in my opinion, are superior to Lowe-Porter's in virtually every aspect. If you are planning to tackle this, probably the best known of Mann's novels, I strongly recommend getting the Woods translation. Bless H. T. for introducing the English-speaking world to the great German, but her time has passed.
The Magic Mountain tells the story of Hans Castorp, an unassuming young man from Hamburg who arrives at the remote Swiss resort of Berghof, nestled in the Alps, where his cousin Joachim Ziemssen is recovering from consumption. Hans, initially planning to stay for only three weeks, is very quickly drawn into the cloistered, secular, routinized and navel-gazing world of the clinic, and towards the idiosyncratic and stimulating residents he encounters during his stay. Despite a rigid determination to quit the bewitching resort after his three weeks are over, Hans - convinced he is a sick man and needs to recuperate, and electrified by the intellectual and sexual stimulation he has experienced - winds up counting his time at the Berghof in years, not weeks.
What Mann was detailing in The Magic Mountain was the sickness, as he perceived it, that was at the core of Europe's malaise; in particular, the way the humane-but-hidebound bourgeoisie was stricken with an enervating fascination with ideas and class rituals, the pursuit of comforts and absorptions dangerously remote from the actual workings of the world and the black clouds gathering across the continent as the twentieth century dawned. Hans is assailed by the secular humanist Settembrini and the Jesuit authoritarian Naphta, who struggle via point and counter-point for the young man's soul. His sickly cousin dreams only of finally becoming healthy enough to rejoin his regiment in the army and faithfully and loyally serve his country, even as the lovely and mysterious Madame Chauchat seductively initiates Hans into the romantic games the resorts libidinous guests play. And looming above them all is Doctor Behrens, the gruff, bluff and blunt chief physician, the man of science who is leading society in its great charge forward.
The novel is all of this, but it is so much more. There is a wealth of detail, fascinating characters, and gorgeous writing - including plentiful sidebars about those German staples, food and music - and depth and insight abound amongst the various actions in this microcosm amongst the Alps. One scene in particular, where Hans finds himself lost amongst the ski slopes as a winter storm breaks, is as starkly beautiful and haunting as anything you will read. The size of the novel may be daunting, but the pages will fly by as you are drawn into Mann's world. Recommended highly and unreservedly - and remember to get the Woods translation!"
"Why did I decide to this? Well, as doomed climbers say about real mountains, it was there - and only a dollar.
But there's another story. A few, quite a few years back, I worked with an elderly Swiss gentleman, very dour and ascetic, whom I always overheard praising the strength of the mighty cockroach in the next cubicle. Usually he did this to elderly salarymen, who would repeat the word cockroach and blink at him in polite discomfort. This gentleman, Fritz, we'll call him, once descended upon me in the lobby and asked if I'd ever read "Die Zauberberg," which with my bad ears and undergrad German, I mentally translated into "The Clean Hill."
Noting my obliviousness, he snapped, "The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann."
Now Mann I knew. I love Death in Venice, and even more so, Visconti's adaptation of same with its garish colors and cackling plague infested minstrels. At that time, the only thing I knew about the book then was that it was one of those reading rites of passage, 800 lurid pages of mottled lungs and five course meals served with sherry in fine crystal.
Fritz, getting the right response, now went on with a sense of mission: "My father was a doctor up in Davos. He tended to many of those patients. I spent my entire boyhood in the sanatorium."
Then he continued to talk about a childhood spent running about the sanatorium grounds, often disturbing the lavish meals of the patients, many of whom he claimed bore a strong resemblance to those in Mann's book.
So I'd been haphazardly planning this one ever since. Was it worth it? Absolutely. If you like novels that dreamily segue into photography, cinema (and this has an amazing description of an early movie going experience) X-rays, gramophones, in-depth explorations of time, and how the place can often make the person, then this is your book.
Not reading The Magic Mountain would have been a lost opportunity, and I found myself scouring the pages, and going over the features of every small or slightly youngish character to appear, expecting that each time Settembrini and Naphta broke into another religious and philosophical spat that they'd be cut off by a gaunt, bespectacled boy, shaking his head and telling them that none of it mattered.
"At the risk of being labelled a Philistine, I declare that this book is one of the most insufferably boring tomes that has ever made it onto my bedside table. I admit that I only struggled my way through the first 170 pages, but that was enough to convince me that I should not waste any more minutes of my precious life wading through any more of this drivel.
I know, I have also been chastised for criticising modern art in the same way. Tracey Emin's "Unmade Bed" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" will just have to live in the pile of junk that I fail to understand.
I realise that I am in the minority, as most reviewers and professors of literature believe this to be a masterpiece, and probably the best book to come out of Germany in the twentieth century. Then again, Hans Christian Anderson's boy who recognised the nakedness of his Emperor as those around him admired the splendour and wonderful colours of their leader's new clothes, was also in the minority.
Perhaps, then, I shouldn't feel too bad about my opinion of this amazing piece of creative writing. It may also explain why English literature was the only `O' Level that I failed, despite having been a prolific reader all of my life. It just happened that the books that were chosen for my studies for those exams also bored me to tears.
Following some comments on this review, I have added these notes (27/9/09).
I have always been a prolific reader, sometimes having up to five books on the go simultaneously. I read most novels at the rate of 80-100 pages per day. With The Magic Mountain, I found that I had been reading a few pages at a time for well over a month, and had only waded through 170. There is so much description attached to the narrative that all that had happened by this stage was that the main character had arrived at the sanatorium, met his old friend and most of the patients. It had also come to light that he really wasn't there for his own medical benefit. He isn't really ill. Rather that he was there for a bit of a rest, and escape from the drudge of life in Hamburg with his guardian, and to be with his best mate. If the descriptions were interesting, and succeeded in conjuring up a wonderful picture in my mind, I wouldn't feel quite so bad about it.
Encouraged by some of the other reviews, I revisited the book, and read the passage describing Hans's adventure in the snow, as that was said to be the best part of the book. I remained unimpressed.
Perhaps I would have enjoyed this book more if my German language were up to the standard required to read the original, but I doubt it. I am not alone in my disillusionment. Several of my friends and family, some of them professors and schoolteachers, share my views, and I have yet to meet anyone who has survived to reach the end. It is obvious that there are many who have read, re-read, and thoroughly enjoyed The Magic Mountain. I am happy for them and I rejoice that the world is full of variety, particularly of taste. Wouldn't life be dull without that?!"
"This is a hard book to rate -- who am I to give a mere three stars to a classic like this? But it has to be done: this is simply not a very good novel. There are a few engaging subplots, and flashes of humanity, but these get destroyed in the steamroller of Mann's symbolic vision: each person represents a particular thing, and always says the same thing, and on and on for 700 agonizing pages. The unfortunate characters who don't fit into the novel's set of symbols are instead completely defined by a random small character trait: one woman, for instance, always mispronounces words, and that is pretty much the entirety of her character.
The plot in a nutshell: a bunch of people spend seven years at a sanatorium in the Alps. Also they represent Europe in an allegory that is transparent to the point of farce. Also they can't talk for more than one paragraph without having an argument about Hegel, freedom, and the French Revolution (in that sense it's a little bit like grad school). This all adds up to a series of Profound Points (tm) about pre-WWI Europe. If you think that is the task of a novel, then you will love this.
The translation also provides some unintentional comedy. Lots of people say things like, "What a harum-scarum! What absolute devil-may-care!" (a real quote), which adds to the dinner theater vibe."
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