Rating: 
Summary: So Many Themes Taken Up in So Much Time
Review: Nominally, the Magic Mountain is the story of Hans Castorp, a young German man who has just finished school and is about to start on a career in shipbuilding. First, he goes for three weeks to a Swiss sanatorium to visit his cousin, partly for a vacation before he starts his job and partly to convince his cousin, a soldier, that he should rejoin the real world rather than stay in the sanatorium. Castorp gets a check-up from the doctor, learns that he is ill and remains for seven years. Mann originally started this book as a novella parody of sanatoriums and medicine in the early 20th Century, when doctors were first saying that disease was created by organisms and were enamored with the power of the newly discovered x-rays. However, Mann stopped the novella at the beginning of World War I, and came back to it at after the war, realizing that he had a lot to say and that this story might be a good vehicle through which to say it. After all, the sanatorium's clientele were the new rich and the old upper class of all the different countries of Europe who began the war. The doctors acted both as the leaders who led them through the insanity and the scientists who made the mechanized, horrible war possible. And Hans Castorp was the age of the soldiers, following the leaders, the aristocracy, the scientists and the intellectuals into battle. You can read all this into the book, if you wish. The doctors are firm in their belief that they are helping their patients, but are not above shenanigans like "proving" with little evidence that patients should stay year-round, rather than leave for the summer in order to line their wallets. Herr Settembrini and later Herr Nafta are the intellectuals filling Castorp with ideas that seem sometimes benign and sometimes diabolical. Castorp is a young, impressionable man who falls madly in love for a fellow patient, Clavdia, but has no outlet for his emotion, except during Carnival--a truly amazing scene, which alone is enough to make the book worthwhile. No wonder this continent was plunged into a tragic war that left Mann with the need to write this beautiful, tragic book. I, however, was more interested in Mann's thoughts about of life in general that permeate this book. My favorite example is the way Mann talks about the concept of "getting used to getting used." He describes it in the sense of Castorp who never gets used to the thin air in the Alps and therefore always winds up redfaced and short of breath. However, Castorp does get used to always being redfaced and short of breath. Therefore, he gets used to getting used to the Alps. This is what part of life is. We are unhappy with many parts of our life (maybe a job, maybe family, maybe friends or lack of friends, or financial resources) and we never get used to that. It leaves us with an empty feeling somewhere in our soul and no way to get rid of it. We never get used to this problem and thus the empty feeling never goes away. But we get used to the empty place in our soul and think of it only occasionally. But it is there crying out. What a sad thought about life. The solution, of course, is to listen to the part that is crying out rather than squelching it and to try to do something about it. But it is often easier to get used to getting used to a situation than it is to fix the situation. It is easier for Castorp to stay in the mountains rather than breathing normally. Overall, an excellent book, with ideas that I had never even come close to thinking of before.
Rating: 
Summary: Farwell Hans!
Review: What a sweeping novel. Really, I have never come across another book in which I felt I knew the main character quite so well as this one. We, the readers, as not spared one detail of Hans Castorp's 7 year soujorn into the Swiss Alps seeking treatment for a supposed case of TB. This novel, quite simply, encompasses all of early twientieth centery Europe. Bergohf, the santatorium where Hans stays, is, as the back of the book states, a microcosm of Europe. Ths you will find that all the characters represent some aspect of the European mindset in the early 1900's (right before World War I, mind you...). We are shown the major deabates of contenintal philosophy, the angry polemic of radicals and reactionaries alike. Our blank slate, Hans, is molded and shaped by this world away from reality, and we come to understand things about human nature, suffering, illness, and strife that simply wouldn't be illuminate otherwise. I did like this book. But in the end, I was finding it excessivley long. Many of the later episodes do not seem to give much to the plot and do not shed any new light on to Hans' character. So I recommend this book with reservations. The Good parts of it are REALLY good. But just be prepared for a long, occasionally frustrating read.
Rating: 
Summary: Sickness and Death
Review: And a huge waste of time - no wonder there was World War I. One reason is that literary/intellectual/philosophy types don't have common sense and they get all of us in trouble with them. You may have to read the book to realize this (thus the second star). Yeah, please read the book a second time, a third time... to get the full meaning. Better yet, please memorize the book. And do it while you're staying at a sanatorium in Davos. And please lose your sense of time. How much would it cost you to stay at Davos?...Please stay for 7 years - it would only cost you a little more than [a few bucks].
Rating:
Summary: One of a kind !
Review: What begins as a slow, listless, ponderous novel soon becomes a stirring adventure of the senses. It is, in fact, the most deliciously sensous book I have ever read. Hans Castorp goes to the Berghf sanatorium in the Swiss mountains to visit his cousin, intending to stay only three weeks, but he ends up staying for seven years. Amidst death and disease, Castorp experiances a dizzying array of physical, spiritual and intellectual impressions, the effects of which all seem sublimated by the rarefied mountain air. The dominant theme is the nature of Time. The Berghof is hermetically sealed, as it were, from the outside world; its inhabitants live by a different clock, where even mundane routines - such as taking one's temperature - assume almost ritualistic proportions. To me, above all this is a novel of the senses, not just the physical senses, but also the "extra-senses" and "Time-sense". It even deals with senseless-ness, both in its inanimate material form and in the form of death. Even the intellectual convolutions of Naphta and Settembrini - one the rational humanist, the other the romantic terrorist - are intensely sensous in that they often leave the logical realm and take flight into a world that may be described as sense-ideas. To the reader, the very act of reading provides a sense of timelessness, of suspended animation in all the hustle-and-bustle of the real world. It is a book to be savoured slowly, for it draws you into its own pace, which is leisurely yet intense. Amidst the pristine whitness of the enchanted mountain, there is much color: the sky here is more intensely blue, the grass greener. The people here, all presumably so ordinary down there at the almost forgotten " flat-land", are here so extraordinarily human, for here they exhaust the limitless sense-possibilities of the human experiance on this earth. This is a most unusual novel, perhaps a one-of-a-kind experiance. It creeps under your skin and enters your bones and becomes, like your senses, part of your earthly existance.
Rating: 
Summary: Well written, but tedious book
Review: After being blown away by the perfection of Thomas Mann's short novels A DEATH IN VENICE and TONIO KRUEGER,and after reading all the glowing reviews of this book I was fully expecting the reading of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN to be on the same level of enjoyment and intellectual stimulation as I experienced while reading Joyce's ULYSSES or Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY. The book started out well and had some gorgeous passages, but after about 250 pages I found myself wanting to skip sections and skip more sections and ultimately came to the conclusion that I found the book to be Wagnerian in it's length and development without sustaining my interest or drawing me into the characters. It dragged on and on and I decided that the time I would expend reading the remaining 550 pages could be spent better on some other reading. I am willing to grant that a German reading this book in his own tongue and with the typical German love of exhaustive exploration of subjects could well react to this book with the same resonance with which I feel when reading Faulkner, Proust or Joyce; but for me, I found that after getting very deep into the novel and scanning the rest of the text that THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN in this translation into English was a let down. I must also qualify my judgement of this book in saying that I prefer the audio book format and like to use good books on literary criticism which help illuminate the texts of great literature, neither of which were available for THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN to the best of my knowledge.
Rating:
Summary: Railing Against Science
Review: Thomas Mann is at the quintessence of twentieth century thought in The Magic Mountain. Those of you who have read Proust might find the book's central thesis similar: (And indeed, the book does have a theme, as much it rambles and tries to confuse you) the subjectivity and illusory reality of Time. From there Mann is a thinker unto himself for he makes sure that you take that statement through all its corollaries. You can't measure the passing of time objectively, and if you had lost your senses (or perhaps you are seriously ill) you will have soon lost grip of its passing; before you've gone to tea again, dinner, and to your second rest cure, you're in your death throes. On the "Magic" Mountain, what's to separate the three weeks that Hans, our main character, initially intends to stay from the seven years it does take him to "be cured," when each day is characterized by monotonous routine?
OK, I'll admit it, this book is not for philistines looking for entertainment, as more than one reviewer has found out. This is cold, hard metaphysics, at times strikingly expressed. The book tempts you to think death is nothing if not constantly occurring, and time nothing other than a "flat-land" device for slowing down that omnipresent decomposition and oxidation of your body, "the natural burning off of life."
Yes, reader, science is at work in this novel. And if I were to flesh out the thesis further, the grotesque and often painful imagery of the sanatorium is Mann's great argument against what science -- medicine -- or further, the industrial revolution -- has given old, antedeluvian society. New ideas work like a disease, no less .. a terminal, horrible dehumanization that makes you doubt all measures in life -- allowing the blinkered Western Civ nothing left but the absolute nihilism.
Beyond the ideas, there is art in Mann's very prolix creation. Unlike other disjointed novels that delve into a character's subconscious, Mann manages to weave it all together. Cliches, slips of the tongue, and dreams hide and obscure fuller, interconnected emotions and strivings that are expressed directly only at brief, lucid moments in the prose -- an original and ingenious device. For example, at the beginning of the book the reader can make no sense of Hans' dreaming and fantasizing about his schoolboy crush for another boy name Hippe -- whose only direct contact he had was that he borrowed a pencil from him. Hans connects this image and episode with his current infatuation for terminally ill guest Clavdia Chauchat. For two hundred pages this point is drawn upon from various angles until finally Mann concocts an occasion where Hans asks Clavdia for a pencil .. and the dialogue, gestures, and body language mirror exactly that long ago encounter with Hippe. It strikes you and comes out of nowhere. Clavdia leaves Berghof the next day, just as Hippe left Hamburg in Hans's youth, leaving the latter to dream and ponder further.
Hans is very much an anti-hero .. while at the same time he is the novel's draw. He's pathetic, lazy, all too comfortable with the disturbing atmosphere of the terminally ill that Mann sketches around him. But unlike everyone else, he seems to be able to preserve simple human optimism and beauty that is obvious dead all around him. Though it's absurd and perverted hope and happiness -- and meant be so. Disturbingly so. Hans is not hopeful about leaving .. rather he is able to look forward to death, all while reclining on his balcony, smoking his cigars, and taking general pleasure as his temperature rises and he becomes presumably more ill. The "Magic" pervades him.
The best that can be said for Mann is this stuff is original while maintaining a great depth of allusion and allegory. Mann doesn't forget he's German -- there's plenty of Faust here. Even a passing reference to Schiller that sticks in your mind. The book abounds with representations and caricatures of Western thought .. everyone is present at the death march that is Mann's portrait of dying Western culture.
Rating: 
Summary: Tedious, obsolete and most obviously from another era
Review: Among the very worst books I have ever read. I won't detail the plot (such as it is) as others have done. I can't relate to these characters at all. A century is not necessarily a long time but in terms of attitude these people might as well be from another world.
No swearing, no rage, no hate. Conversations between characters are artifical and often just statements of politics, philosophy, religion.Endless descriptions of food eaten, clothes worn.
If this was the only book in the world I would never read a written word again I hated it that much. The author could kill people with boredom and intellectual waffle without getting to any point.He manages to say in 1000 words what another author could say in 10. Not so much a novel as a sort of encyclopedia of descriptions of the human body, attitudes to life and being bored.
Life is too short to read this.
A book like Stephen King's 'It' is worth a 5/5 for it's sense of fun, drama, depth, terror, endless stories and characters. This book is for me a 1/5
Rating:
Summary: One of the book of ideas
Review: Finished this book last night and still trying to digest all that Thomas Mann was trying to tell me. A book of many levels, some of which I remain only dimly aware of. At its most basic level a young man spends seven years in a health spa during which time his contacts with the inhabitants educate him in the forces which are tearing at europe such as liberal humanism, aesthic spirituality and the ever present human passion. I am left with the feeling that Mann was himself struggling with the issues that he raised. That to him it was "the great confusion". He does not provide answers, but in Magic Mountain he provides many of the questions which we should be asking.
Rating:
Summary: Tough read, but hang in there
Review: This book was difficult to read. It certainly is not a page turner like any Harry Potter book. However, it is rewarding if you are patient. It is about a young engineer, Hans, who ends up at a sanatorium. The details of the surroundings and characters are very detailed. He meets interesting characters from all over the world. The story lends itself to corcucopia of philosophical discussions and deep soul searching. While I can not see real people debate like Settembrini and Naphta did, I learned a great deal from the depth of their knowledge and their passion for what they believed in and why. Hans was no hero, but I still wanted to know what happened to him. I had a problem with the Ellen Brand sessions. I would have preferred some romance instead.
Rating:
Summary: On the cusp of a new Europe
Review: To a great many Europeans, World War I must have seemed like Armageddon, a cataclysmic event that would completely and irrevocably transform the continent. Covering the time leading up to the war, "The Magic Mountain" personifies this transformation in its main character, a young man named Hans Castorp, whose life becomes immeasurably enriched after he abandons the ease and complacency of his childhood and opens his mind to new vistas of knowledge. It is not just the coming-of-age novel of a man, but of the world. Hans is a moderately intelligent engineering student from Hamburg who grew up in an environment of comfort and leisure with not many thoughts about anything other than what concerns him directly. One summer, he goes to the Swiss Alps for three weeks to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is convalescing at a sanatorium called Berghof for people with respiratory ailments. While there, Hans takes ill as well and is forced to stay longer to recuperate, a stay which stretches itself out to seven years. At the Berghof, Hans makes the acquaintance of several other patients of various intellectual and social levels. Most prominent is an Italian named Settembrini, a freelance writer, cynic, and progressivist who dreams of a world republic and believes literature is the ultimate unification of politics and humanism. His current work in focus is the contribution of a literature section to an encyclopedia on human suffering, the intent of which is to catalog all its causes and try to eliminate them. Settembrini has a nemesis in another off-site patient named Leo Naphta, a Jew-turned-Jesuit who advocates a sort of Christian communism, using St. Augustine's City of God as a model. These two have ongoing philosophical and theological debates, the effect of which is a battle for Hans's soul. Hans gradually broadens his interests, indulging himself in biology, anatomy, botany, skiing, music, and the exploration of the ultimate scientific mystery, how life grew out of unlife. Other patients also occupy his time: Clavdia Chauchat, a married woman whose husband never enters the picture and who is the object of many affections at the Berghof; the malapropism-speaking Frau Stohr; Paravant, a mathematician who is trying to determine if pi is a rational number; Mynheer Peeperkorn, a wealthy Dutch epicure; and Ellen Brand, a girl with paranormal experiences. Along with Jorge Luis Borges, Mann is arguably the most erudite writer of 20th Century fiction. I was consistently amazed at the depth and detail with which he could write about such a wide variety of subjects, from the sciences to the arts to politics. The novel expects its reader to be highly and thoroughly educated, but don't sweat the tough stuff; you can approach unfamiliar territory with the wide-eyed wonder of Hans and imbibe the ideas presented as food for thought and discussion.
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