Rating: 
Summary: My favorite novel
Review: I have read this novel three times and I love it more and more everytime. It is true: this is a difficult, long reading, but it is worth your time. The first time it took me about six months to finish it... and I think that it is the best way to read this novel. The reader goes along with the main character through the most interesting trip. Hans Castorp goes to Davos-Platz in order to pay a visit to a cousin of him who is being treated in a hospital up in the mountains. Way up. Joachim, the cousin, suffers tuberculosis and must be contained in the cold enviroment so the illness is kept under control. Hans is supposed to stay with his cousin for three weeks, but his plans extend themselves as an unusual attraction develops between him and a russian woman. He and Joachim are joined by the philosopher Settembrini, with whom they talk about the nature of sickness and a supposed respect towards sick people. The rythm of the novel is the most interesting I have ever seen in a work of fiction (Thomas Mann really handles the rythm of events like no one else: how much should an event be explored or briefly described). Join Hans in his trip to a hospital, to the heights of a mountain, to his own physical degradation, to his intellectual developments. Meet along with him Settembrini, Naphta (who was based in the wonderfull philosopher and critic Georg Lucáks), Peeper, the doctors... Live with him the time when he lost his way and had the most wonderfull hallucination I have ever read, live the sessions in which he and his mates meet the world of the spirits... hear his intellecutual divagations. There is so much in this novel... I can only compare it to Cervantes' Don Quixote.
Go into the magic of the reality... the real world is magical, more than in terms of phantasy, in terms of our own minds, our inheritance and our experience of time (rythm). To read this novel is to get deeper in the experience of time itself.
Rating:
Summary: Mesmerizing Mountain
Review: This is an epic, sweeping novel about a chap named Hans Castorp who travels to a health sanitarium on a mountain to visit his cousin. To his horror, he discovers that he has tuberculosis, and his stay is lengthened from a few weeks to seven years. Over the course of his sojourn in the mountains, he meets sundry fascinating personages & ponders philosophy, history, art, literature, politics, death and just about every other intellectual topic there is. One of the many strengths of this book is its character development. There are many magnificent personas which Mann brings to life under his pen. They range from eccentric doctors to off-the-wall acadamecians to one really hilarious character who can seemingly do nothing and still make me laugh. In an essay Mann wrote, he described the book as something akin to a grail quest for Castorp. That, I think, is the closest one can come to saying what this book is "about." I often debate with myself whether the conclusion is deus ex machina, but will probably have to read it a few more times before I decide for sure. In any case, this book is an intellectual mountain to climb......and one may even find some magic there as well.
Rating:
Summary: If there were ten stars...
Review: Someone once asked what was The Magic Mountain about. After thinking for a little while, answered I: It's about Men, it's about Time, it's about Love, it's about Europe. Then it's sort of philosophy? he said. Yes, it's philosophy.
May this words help everyone who's looking everywhere for substantial and deep literature. Mann's Magic Mountain is just superb. A book that will shake and smack your mind. Like Dostoievsky, like Kafka, like Cervantes, like Greek Tragedy.
Rating:
Summary: This isn't Stephen King
Review: I am writing this feedback solely based on the comparison another reviewer of Thomas Mann to Stephen King. The comparison is not fair to either writer. Stephen King writes contemorary american horror, Mann is an author of classical literature and he won a pulitzer prise.
This book is a masterpiece. It is a story about love unfulfilled, realition of death and sickness and about the general human condition. You will not get anything out of this book if you are not ready to recieve.
Rating:
Summary: A dizzying achievement that even the author couldn't control
Review: Thomas Mann once stayed at a Swiss sanitarium to visit his ailing wife. The hermetic atmosphere, with its peculiar customs, rich foods, rigid schedule and empty hours of "the cure" was at once ridiculous and addictive. The patients lived as if they were in a kind of glass dome where even time had no meaning. The absurd and the profound became huge preoccupations there. Mann found the atmosphere so compelling that he knew if he didn't at once depart, he'd be tempted to stay for life. To work off his deep impressions of the place, Mann first wrote "Tristan", a short story satirizing the patients and atmosphere at a sanitarium, and shallowly scratching the theme of sickness as a metaphor for refinement and beauty (like the Love-Death motif in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.) However, this short story only whetted Mann's appetite to more deeply inspect the experience. He embarked, as usual, on a "short novel" and The Magic Mountain, emerged. And a mountain it is, too. Mann said himself he just couldn't control the novel, it grew and grew of its own accord. And why not? To thoroughly (and I mean German-style thoroughly) investigate an experience of isolation and eternity, you'd need plenty of room to talk yourself out. This, Mann did. What resulted was a dizzying achievement, a book of rich characters, philosophical struggles, intellectual foes pitted against intellectual opposites; the Dionysian pitted against the Apollonian; and of course the theme of society in the sweet snare of decadent dissolution before Armegeddon--WWI. To give a snapshot of the plot: Hans Castor, a young man in his 20's, has finished engineering school and is about to start a career, none too enthusiastically, in shipbuilding. He takes a short vacation before starting his new job to visit a cousin in a tuberculosis sanitarium. The cousin, a young military man, is unhappily cooped up at the clinic. Castorp, however, becomes instantly smitten with the strange but alluring life in the sanitarium. He finds a reason to lengthen his stay; does he have a bad set of lungs as well? The novel takes off from there and Castorp finds a mentor in Herr Settembrini, an Italian humanist and begins to dive naively and recklessly into deep philosophical waters. Add a hard-to-get love interest and Castorp is lost to the world until a clarion call comes that he cannot ignore. The author says in the forward that it is necessary to read the novel twice. At a minimum, I say. This is one book that can be mined endlessly for ideas, symbology, and even just to revisit irresistable characters like the good Joachim, Mynheer Pieperkorn, Clavdia Chauchat and Naphta in his silken lair above the tailor shop.
Rating: 
Summary: Of Relative Value
Review: Well, I finally broke down and slugged my way through it. (Actually, this was attempt number two.) I may be way off, but to me this is a novelist's novel, a literary effort best appreciated by literary students and not by one who reads purely for pleasure and intellectual or artistic gratification. To someone who, like me, just likes to read and has always been curious about this book, I would suggest choosing something else. The novel defies standard evaluation (i.e., assignment of three stars, four stars, etc.) owing to its scope and the unique nature of its aspirations. The text takes up about 1,200 pages in conventional format. (My copy is 700 pages of microscopic font crammed onto the page.) Is there 1,200 pages worth of plot in the book? Absolutely not. 1,200 pages of philosophy? Doubtful. Still, as the story's narrator explains, a person's entire life can be told in two pages, or a thousand pages could describe a single event. The book is in part a study of time and its measure - it does not seek to develop in the same manner or pace as other novels. To tell this particular story in the way Mann wants it told, a great deal of pages are indeed needed. This notwithstanding, the book is best left, in my opinion, to those who really like to make a study of what they read. Mann himself suggested reading it twice. (The only problem with this approach is that it would take 18 years of one's life.) The book is excellent on many levels, difficult on others. As a work of art, it is unusually dense and all-encompassing. Almost against his will, the reader is drawn in as the main character's fate unfolds, brought about what one could call his willful passivity. The plot and character "development" are of fascinating, unparalleled strangeness. At the same time, assessing the novel's intended meaning is a perplexing task. The book's "hero" (for he is often referred to as such) seems to be anything but heroic. Rather, he could be seen as a walking advertisement for the perils of the undesirable traits he possesses. His defining character trait is stagnation. All of his second-hand philosophical posturing is merely a lame attempt to justify his disdain for exertion and his cowardly withdrawal from pursuing a purposeful life in the "flatland" below. (However, Mann - as well as many of the reviewers here - apparently really did consider Hans a hero engaged in the act of philosophical self-improvement. Strange.) Lacking a self, the hero's views and even personality traits are lifted from those around him. (Witness his shameless incorporation of Peepercorn's affectations.) The character most vocal in his defense of virtue (Settembrini) is, on the whole, not particularly virtuous himself. The character presented as the most virtuous (Joachim) is neither the happier nor the more prosperous for his virtue. Furthermore, it is often difficult for the reader to discern whether the narrator's praise for a character is intended to be sincere or ironic. To a non-literati like me, the author's approach to his craft is often suspect. Momentum is often dispersed by questionable digressions; new major characters are introduced up until the end; fifteen pages are often used where three would suffice. Mann seems intent on presenting himself as a renaissance man, one who can write expertly on a plethora of subjects. He is not grandstanding or hotdogging - it's just the way he writes - but it does require patience on the part of the reader who may not particularly care to detour through a discourse on snake venom while trying to advance through the story. Before embarking on this endeavor, I was hoping to be able to dismiss the standard Objectivist (i.e., cult of Ayn Rand) objection to this work - that the philosophizing contained within exists for its own sake and isn't integrated into the plot or theme of the novel. The criticism seems to be unjustified as the passages in question unfold. The philosophical views expressed are relevant to the theme and to the development of the characters who express them. After a while, however, I had to concede the point. On and on these dialogues go, completely dissociated from the rest of the book, requiring mental brute force just to plow through them. Score one for the Objectivists. To the serious student of literature, I can recommend this book unequivocally. To the average reader - even a fairly serious one - the cost-benefit ratio here does not justify the considerable investment of time required to get through Mann's masterpiece. I mean, to me Crime and Punishment is a real page-turner, but I had to force my way through lengthy passages of The Magic Mountain on numerous occasions. I rate it three stars, rather than four or five, for (what I perceive to be) its literary limitations. However as I mentioned earlier, this rating is fairly arbitrary. To the right reader, this could be one of the greatest books ever written.
Rating: 
Summary: An amazing work of fiction
Review: What is the difference between learning and naiveté, original thought and stupidity, good and evil? What does it mean to find yourself in totally strange world where the time is still and disease is an every day occurrence, where snow is around 9 months out of 12, and where death is part of life? Hans Kastorpe is diagnosed with a light form of tuberculosis and has to spend over a year on mountain top in a health resort. The experience radically changes him. From a somewhat high minded bourgeois he turns into a thoughtful young man, studying sciences he never thought of studying before, thinking about life, philosophy and politics, arguing with his two highly educated friends, and wondering whether he will ever come back to the plain. The book is uneven -- on its highs it takes one like an ocean wave and the words are being simply breathed in. On its lows it becomes a bit tedious, a bit wordy, a bit too philosophical. But overall a great work.
Rating:
Summary: A giant, but smaller than reported
Review: Thomas Mann is one of those writers that I want to like because I know I am supposed to, but at the end of the day, despite a valiant effort, we are not really friends, only friendly acquaintances. The Magic Mountain is the story of a young man, Hans Castorp, who goes to a a mountain convalescent community and takes a cure which we and he are not certain he really needs. His motivations seem to be in equal parts, one part flight from his uncle's business, and one part convalescence from a disease that might or might not be tuberculosis. This vacation among the sick, however, is entangling, and soon Mr. Castorp is told and he accepts (though we are not certain he believes it) that he must stay. We share Mr. Castorp's world and meet more of the patients and doctors, we learn that Mr. Castorp is not the only person whose motives are unclear, we begin to doubt the doctors, the other patients, and eventually-as the story moves into a more allegorical sphere-even the existence of the convalescent community in which the story takes place. I like the book. I'm not sure it deserves the critical acclaim it enjoyed when it was published. Perhaps I would like it more if I were more certain of its historical context.
Rating:
Summary: Reading for enjoyment
Review: The Magic Mountain has it all, it is probably my favorite book - highly literary, readable, transparent, coherent, complete. Mann is not a challenge to read when you compare him to the other two great 20th Century novelists, Joyce and Proust. Reading Mann is comparable to reading Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in that it is highly gratifying at all times; it is never obscure, philosophical, or inaccessible and there are no "innovations" like "stream-of-consciousness" writing. This does not mean it is not deep - it is very deep, but Mann sticks to the story without digressions and you always know what is going on and what the context is. The best parts of the Magic Mountain involve Mann's examination of competing world political ideologies and their limitations and contradictions. Through his characters he shows how ideologies often mean the same thing, they just express it in a different way. He also parodies the sophistry of ideologues and illustrates the inevitable futility of taking hard-line positions on anything. The book is NOT ideological in itself, unless you consider freedom of thought an ideology.
Rating:
Summary: A very rewarding experience, but one you have to earn
Review: It has been said that a classic is a work that everyone wants to have read, but which no one actually wants to read. Now, having read this novel, I agree wholeheartedly with that statement. I'm glad I read it, and was certainly thoroughly enlightened by its message and its incredible range of philosophical and intellectual topics, but I must admit that reading this book was a laborious process.
The story is set in a saniorium in the Swiss Alps. The institution serves as a microcosm of pre-World War I Europe, and the patients are representative of the various ruling classes which eventually brought about the conflict. Two opposing philosophies, the "Asiatic" and the "European," are represented in the persons of Settembrini and Naphta. The book's central revolves around this, the parody of European social structure before the great war.
Of course, there is much, much more to the book that just this. Everything from music to medicine is covered, and a great many intellectual debates are contained, spanning everything from monism and dualism to progress and the status quo. There is also a very extensive reference to time. In fact, Time seems to be a character of the novel, and a great deal of the book covers the way we perceive time and how it works in relation to us.
I loved this novel, and feel like it is certainly worth having read. As I said, however, it is a very difficult read (at least it was for me), and often I felt as if I were wading through material too deep for me to comprehend. Mann was a brilliant individual, and deserved the Nobel Prize he won for literature. This monumental work deserves to be called one of the 'classics' of this century. It is difficult at times, yes, but it is also supremely rewarding.
|
