The Magic Mountain (1924)

Initial hefting of this 700-page+ opus might lead to feeling as if one faces the prospect of climbing a literal mountain itself, but I say have no fear and take the trailhead. I like the classic H.T. Lowe-Porter translation almost as much as the more recent John Woods, but ultimately favor the Woods if only for going the extra service of translating a long passage in French that Lowe-Porter leaves in French. I have probably mentioned before that I am a monoglot, so I need all the help I can get. I can't even speak to Mann in the original German, of course, but holy cow, if he reads this slick and knowing and elegant in translation I can only imagine. The Magic Mountain tells the tale of a naive yet mostly sincere young man at the turn of the 20th century, one Hans Castorp, who pays a visit to a cousin who is recuperating at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, finds himself incidentally diagnosed as symptomatic, and ends up remaining there for years himself. Is Castorp actually sick? Well, tuberculosis even now is notoriously difficult to gauge and treat, and surely even more so a century ago, but the short answer is probably no, not so much, and in any event it's a bit off the point. Once there, Castorp discovers that the routines of the place, the simplicities afforded by having his everyday needs ministered to, eventually even the boredom itself, along with the fascinating cast of European characters into whose orbits he falls, serve to liberate him in any number of enviable and exciting ways as he embarks—or, more accurately, stumbles—on various adventures of the modernist intellect, whether sociological, religious, or political: attempting to comprehend the experience of time, pondering the vagaries of how we are affected by music, and so forth. It all gets a bit allegorical, standing in for a Europe unwittingly rotting from the inside in the run-up to World War I. There are wizened, effete, dare I say decadent intellectuals mixing it up with would-be proletariats posturing for the revolution, radical Christians, dedicated hedonists, louts and the well-mannered, the innocent and the predatory and the utterly oblivious, there are even objects of heartbreaking love, and all of it taking place snug as a bug at the glorious remove of a remote outpost in the Swiss Alps. You say I'm not making this sound interesting? I can't explain exactly why this works so well—maybe it's as simple as the sheer seductiveness of Mann's language, which works so well even in translation. Maybe it's the masterful allusiveness with which he approaches and backfills his plot points. Whatever it is, this powerful and slyly humorous novel grabs hold and doesn't let go until the very end, and it rewards rereading too.

In case it's not at the library.