Rating: 
Summary: Meisterwerk
Review: Yes, Germany produced the Nazis, but they also produced Thomas Mann and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and for that, I'm ALMOST ready to forgive them. The Magic Mountain, which unfortunately and distractingly shares its title with a major amusement park in Southern California, is an embarrassment of intellectual and poetic riches, a book whose every rift is loaded with ore, and quite simply the best and most teeming novel of ideas ever written. Compared to Mann's masterpiece, War and Peace is like the soap that runs down the crack of your butt in the shower. To put none too fine a point upon it. Here's the problem: it MUST be read twice. This is according to the author's own edict, as well as mine. When, over half a century ago, Mann asked those who bought his novel to read it twice, everyone thought he was on his own Magic Mountain. At first, so did I. How thin was the air up there that he could ask such a thing? Certainly some pinnacle of hubris had been reached. For God's sake, the book has over 700 pages of microscopically small print, requires intense concentration and is, let's face it, a little bit on the boring side. It's not the kind of thing you'd wanna take to the beach with you, let's put it that way. Customarily the author is the last person who should be trusted on the subject of his own work, but, in this case, Mann was absolutely right. It's not that Magic Mountain is so mind-boggling that it doesn't sink in the first time, but... -- well, actually that's exactly what it is. This novel is simply too DENSE to have any kind of impact on the first reading. If you're like me, you'll find yourself rushing, treating the book as a challenge to be overcome ( or a Mountain to be climbed ), rather than an immersive and all-consuming experience. This will get you nowhere. Ideally, this book isn't to be read so much as lived through, and at a carefully calibrated pace. Mann made a big stink over the "symphonic" structure of Magic Mountain. That was just a fancy way of saying that it's about time. And it is, more so than Wordsworth, even more so than Proust -- not only is the book about time, but the structure and even the prose is designed to mirror the hero's shifting sense of time as it slips from his grasp. Every section, every chapter has a different tempo and a different rhythm. What Mann does is revolutionary -- he forces you to reassess and think out the seemingly simple and instinctive process of reading. For that reason, and many more, it's not for everybody. But those who do commit themselves to the challenge -- not once, but twice -- will find their own lives illuminated in a million subtle ways.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT
Review: This is my all-time favortie novel. The first time I read it, I was overwhelmed by Mann's skill as a writer and how beautifully-crafted the novel is. It was so good, I didn't even want to return it to the library! The symbolism was amazing; I was still noticing things as I reviewed the novel in my head weeks later. "I am much indebted to you for the elucidation" is a great line (one among many!). Not light reading, but a definite masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Unforgettable
Review: Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain is the essence itself of the decadence in Europe: beauty stands so close to love and death and wanders through the enchanted situations and characters page after page, always so incredible and original in its expressions. And the declaration to Clavdia, "le toi de ma vie", is an unforgettable emotion connecting the story to absolute poetry.
Rating:
Summary: A Mesmerizing Work
Review: When you read the Magic Mountain, you understand what is intended by "classic." This book is mesmerizing and stunningly relevant to the times we live in. It truly conjures a life, a person's life and experiences in a way that no book I've ever read does. It has the immediacy of small details characterizing life in the Swiss sanitarium (making it real to the reader) coupled with the powerful and dramatic. It's got intellectual debate, feverish passion, crazed humor, dreamy hallucination, symbolism and the supernatural. Mann's narrative (and rumination on time - connecting the novel's warped time with our own time spent reading the book) has a way of sucking us in without letting us realize it, until it's too late; a way of making this novel a story of the reader's own life in the most unaccountably inventive manner. The portraits of the characters are as vividly tangible as the power of their words engaged in intellectual debate. And yet it runs deeper or as deep as the intellectual into a realm totally encompassing the reader and satisfying our minds and souls.
Rating: 
Summary: slowly developing concept of time and space
Review: Mann succeeds in giving the reader a different perception of the passing of time in this secluded place in the Swiss Alps. The pace of the story is on one hand disturbing the reader's sense of time and on the other hand reveals the decadence of this society where the disease becomes something like a title and health and life are disdained.
Rating:
Summary: A sensitive book about love and life
Review: Even if it seems to be classic and old-fashioned
this book reveals a very sensitive view of life
and an intimate insight in the time of the author
by a very detailed and adoring description of the
main actors feelings and thoughts.
This is definitely one of the books to take to
a lonely island.
Rating:
Summary: Monumental work of the most brilliant mind to write fiction
Review: Having read most of Thomas Mann's works in English translation, I am of the opinion that he is the most brilliant man ever to become a well known novelist. In general, his books are hard to read. But, he puts more ideas and thoughts into one book than any other novelist I have read. The Magic Mountain brings before the reader, in one novel, the entire spectrum of European thought in the time preceding World War 1. I found the book very slow going. But when you have finished the book, you will be overwhelmed by the greatness of the book and of Thomas Mann's mind. If you want to read a book by him that is easy. try The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Highly enjoyable
Rating: 
Summary: Uneven
Review: I definitely enjoyed portions of "The Magic Mountain," but the novel, as a whole, also took a great deal of time and effort to get all the way through. There are parts of this book -- especially near the end -- that are riveting: the seance and the dual, for instance, and the snowstorm was O.K. (not as exciting as I had hoped), but this isn't a page turner. It's a treatise on the nature of time and a disjointed discussion on religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis and a little bit of history as well.
Being neither historian, philosopher nor cleric, I can't really comment on those aspects of the book other than to say I couldn't always follow the discussion, and frankly, I got bored of it from time to time. Whenever Settembrini and Naphta started pontificating, my mind tended to wander, and it became a struggle to pay attention, let alone to care.
For me, and I suspect for most readers, the more interesting portions of the story have to do with Hans Castorp and Madame Chavchat, the eccentric and annoying Peeperkorn, and the mysterious Ellen Brand. Too bad those characters don't have more to do in the story. Instead we are treated to huge doses of Settembrini, Naphta, the doctors and some of the minor characters like Frau Stohr.
Something else that I found unsatisfying were Mann's lengthy scenery descriptions. They didn't exactly make me feel as though I were there, they merely made me glance at my wristwatch. Get on with the story, already!
Overall, it's an interesting story (though near the end it reads more like a series of short stories, and less like a novel), but Mann could have used a tough editor. Seven hundred pages of this was just too much. It could have been done so much more effectively in 300 to 400 pages. By the end, you feel as though you yourself spent seven years in a sanitorium, or at least like you too might benefit from a vacation in the Alps!
Rating:
Summary: Best novel ever?
Review: From my subjective insight, this book is the best book ever written. The book is really about three things: time, illness, and death. If you are philosophically inclined, or if you want a book to challenge the way your perceive time this book is for you. If you want to read an entertaining novel to make you feel good about your life...or if you are looking for a book to make you relax from your job....this book is not what you seek.
Mann is able to combine words that create dazzling imagery...especially in his descriptions of various characters and the unfoldings of nature.
Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Book
Review: Like some other reviewers have said, this is not for philistines who are comparing Mann to Stephen King who writes purely to entertain us. This book is for people who enjoy to using their brain cells once in a while. Some say it's too long but they have missed the point because this book is also about Time, a subject that never gets outdated. Mann never wrote formula novels, so all his books are not exactly the same. I suppose I am biased about this writer. The man was a giant. My first copy wore out and had to buy a new one.
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