Not necessarily a caliber that will appeal, interest or awe you but nonetheless high as a mountain in terms of quality. Writing throughout is of the highest caliber. The details are abundant and for the most part well chosen. “We shall tell it at length, in precise and thorough detail - for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling? Unafraid of the odium of appearing too meticulous, we are much more inclined to the view that only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.”įair enough. So I avoided this mountain of ideas for decades. Especially since the shelf life for most ideas is so short. But beyond Camus the novel of ideas holds little interest for me. For me THE STRANGER works because it contains only one idea, which convincingly obliterates all other ideas. Well, I admire both THE COUNTERFEITERS and LAFCADIO’S ADVENTURES but for their art not their ideas, whatever they may be. While I can't claim to understand the ultimate significance of the plot, I enjoyed the odd, humorous interactions of the characters, I was dazzled by Mann's brilliance, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed my stay in the sanitorium.īelieve it was Andre Gide who said we shouldn’t dismiss the novel of ideas because no one does it well - implying that he did. Reading the book was like slaloming down a tall ski slope on a fresh crisp heap of powdered snow. Mann's writing has a cheerful, effervescent energy that carries the reader through effortlessly. While I missed much, I still appreciated the novel-its ambitious length its polished, literate prose its absurd humor its wit.

I could have benefited from a critical introduction and multiple readings, as there is a great deal of symbolism that went over my head. I read the book once, independently, with no assistance from critical essays or lit professors. Reading the book was like catching a mild fever (in a good way), and, in taking more than a year to finish it (I was reading many other books), I feel that I, too, absurdly overstayed the length of my visit. I finally finished The Magic Mountain about our aimless young Hans Castorp, who visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanitorium in the Swiss Alps and, in a Kafkaesque twist, ends up staying there for seven years because of a mild fever.

The magic mountain by thomas mann