The Magic Mountain

Set in the dreamlike world of a Swiss health sanatorium, here is a story of a young man's enlightenment through his encounters with sickness and death; an elegy to the romanticism of the European bourgeoisie in the days prior World War I.

Hans Castorp - on the verge of an intense flirtation with Clavdia Chauchat, a married woman and feverish fellow patient - is perched high above the world, dozing in his splendid lounge chair at the International Sanatorium Berghof, swaddled in blankets against the Alpine chill.

To his surprise and secret delight, he will remain on this "magic mountain" for seven years - removed from the "real" world, but irresistibly drawn into the sanatorium's own complex, vertiginous society, which in Mann's hands becomes a microcosm for Western civilization and its interior life on the eve of the First World War.

Flooded with feeling, with powerful evocations of disease, with the glories of the natural world and inklings of the supernatural, The Magic Mountain is equally remarkable for Mann's treatment of time - the "flatland time" of healthy, active people and the "inelastic present" of the "people up here, " for whom illness is a lifelong career.

Mann is a master at drawing dazzling characters with the finest irony: Settembrini, the impassioned Italian liberal, and Naphta, the caustic Jewish Jesuit, whose opposing world views trap them in a grotesque duel; Mynheer Peeperkorn, the enormously wealthy Dutch planter whose garrulous "personality" all but overwhelms his fellow patients; the blustery Director Behrens and subtle Dr. Krokowski, whose combined energies rule the day and the night of the Berghof; Clavdia Chauchat, the elusive Russian beauty whose slinking charms can awaken forgotten love; and, of course, Hans Castorp himself - the ordinary made extraordinary - whose interior journey leads him out into a blinding snowstorm and a stunning, fleeting moment of revelation; Hans, who is last seen on a battlefield of the Great War - the very conflict toward which every word of the novel has been magnetized.

About the Author

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards he left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University of Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he recieved in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.