In the years before the outbreak of World War I, a young man named Hans Castorp takes a train into the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, Joachim, at a remote tuberculosis sanatorium. He does not come down for seven years. This is the simple premise of Thomas Mann’s epic tome (which I read all of, thanks very much [John E. Woods, trans.]), and he manages to expand this small environment into a concentrated illustration of early twentieth-century Europe, with all of its competing religious, political and cultural philosophies.
Hans is a well-meaning, chipper, Winnie-ther-Poohish sort of guy – pompous and mockable, yet generally open and interested in everyone he meets: from Joachim, the soldier who simply wants to return to duty; Settembrini, the Italian intellectual who fights to win Hans’s mind to the side of rationalism and humanism in his endless debates with the doctrinnaire Jesuit, Naphta; Clavdia, a resourceful and practical Russian who Hans worships unrequitedly; Doctor Behrens, who rules over the patients and swings unpredictably from crowing arrogance to petulant anger; and Peeperkorn, Clavdia’s Dutch lover, a drunken, jovial Bacchus, who captivates all with his vitality and hospitality.
During his tenure on the mountain, Hans forms loyalties and breaks them. He falls in love, develops hero-worships, becomes disenchated. He ruminates and debates every topic under the sun, informed by new ideas put forth by Freud, Einstein and other contemporary thinkers. Occasionally, Hans ventures alone into the natural world surrounding the sanitorium, and on such jaunts, he experiences both grand spiritual realizations and taxing physical punishments. With the introduction of a phonograph to the rec room, he becomes an obsessive audiophile.
Not easily categorized, TMM is part allegory, part parody, part philosophic meditation, part picaresque (without the journey). It is also in large part a meditation on the nature of time. Hans constantly remarks on the passing of time – how it speeds or slows depending on one’s level of activity. The patients are all required to carry thermometers with them at all time (called their ‘silent sisters’), and each day, the ten minutes during which Hans takes his temperature serves as a sort of meditation, in which time passes so slowly that this part of the day seems the longest and most substantial. The members of the sanatorium on the mountain live under the constantly hovering specter of death, but they seldom acknowledge it. The deceased are whisked away at opportune moments, unmourned and unobserved. Each character has strong opinions on the relation between external and internal health and decay, on the importance or unimportance of the corporeal human body, and on the nobility or baseness of physical illness itself. Toward the end of the novel, Hans makes a point of attending to the terminally ill patients, by doing favors for them, bringing them flowers and taking them on little jaunts. This charitable attention is viewed with suspicion and derision by many of the others.
The protagonist’s education on the mountain illustrates Mann’s belief that to be truly fit for life, one must first pass through a period of illness and death. As Hans suffers and recovers from both tuberculosis and existential confusion, so Europe prepares to pass through war and turmoil into a new modernity. When Hans at long last returns to the “flatlands” below the Magic Mountain, it is to a Europe decimated by a war that will forever alter it:
With appropriately lowered voice, we shall say that the thunderbolt itself (with which we are all familiar) was the deafening detonation of great destructive masses of accumulated stupor and petulance. It was, to speak in subdued, respectful tones, a historic thunderclap that shook the foundations of the earth; but for us it is the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates. There he sits in the grass, sheepishly rubbing his eyes, like a man who, despite many an admonition, has failed to read the daily papers.
A great deal of this book is excruciatingly dull to wade through – particularly the frequent and interminable circular philosophical debates between Settembrini and Naphta, which makes you want to reach into the book and bash their heads together – but the ambition and scope of the thing cannot be denied. It’s one of those reading experiences that is best upon reflection. Like paintings that are random splotches of color up close, but amazingly detailed landscapes from a distance, some books are tiresome by the page, but rewarding in the aggregate.
