All of the action takes place on the titular mountain-a reference to a sentence in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche is himself referring to Mount Olympus-as the young, impressionable Castorp gets sucked into the environment.
The premise is simple: Hans Castorp, a likable, if simpleminded, young man visits his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, in a sanatorium for a three-week stay, and ends up staying seven years. So I hope my reader will excuse me if this review it a bit disorganized, a bit slipshod, as I wrestle with this novel’s hydra heads in no particular order. Even perhaps more so than Ulysses, the novel is a throwing down of the gauntlet, a tremendous, impudent challenge to any would-be critic. And, make no mistake, the task is difficult for The Magic Mountain is perhaps the most ambiguous and elusive work of literature I’ve ever read. Now, seven long weeks later, I have set myself the difficult task of reviewing this book. So it was with excitement and trepidation that I recently walked into a book store and bought a copy of his most iconic novel: The Magic Mountain. The point of this autobiographical digression is that Thomas Mann has earned himself a special place in my reader’s heart. The acute joys of reading fine literature, so alien before, were slowly opening themselves up to me. Yet I still managed to enjoy the collection more, I even savored it. It was work enough to simply understand a sentence unweaving his sophisticated themes and symbols was beyond my ken. (In fact, a friend recently borrowed my copy of Death in Venice, wherein I underlined every word I didn’t know “Man, your vocabulary sucked,” he said as he returned it.) So you can imagine what it was like for me to try and tackle the enormous erudition and sophistication of Thomas Mann. Only rarely did I do my assigned readings, and so I had a remarkably poor vocabulary. I was a negligent student of literature in high school. But of all the great books we made our way through that semester, the one that most stuck with me was Mann’s collection of short fiction, which included Death in Venice. It was a great class we read Plato’s Symposium, Sappho’s poetry, the Song of Solomon, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch. In my freshman year of college, I took a literature course to fulfill a core curriculum requirement: Sexuality in Literature.
Running the (Full) M… on The Madrid Half-MarathonĢ023: New Year… on From Gold to Glory: A Slice of…Ģ023: New Year… on Summertime in Andalucía: Three…Ģ023: New Year… on Summertime in Andalucía: …Ģ023: New Year… on Summertime in Andalucía: Jerez…Īh yes, irony! Beware of the irony that flourishes here, my good engineer.
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