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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
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: 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: 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 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.
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