![]() In the course of things, Hans is himself diagnosed with tuberculosis, and remains on the titular mountain for seven years, before leaving to fight in the Great War. The novel’s story, briefly, though I suspect if you are interested in this novel you already know the outline: a young orphaned bourgeois German engineering student, Hans Castorp, intends to have a brief visit with his soldier cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, in the Berghof, an Alpine tuberculosis sanatorium administered by Dr. We are lazy nihilists, without even the courage of our privilege, who write in miserable, metaphysically spiteful fragments as we nervously eye the horizon for the army of our liquidation. As the older Georg Lukács (whose younger self turns up on Mann’s mountain in the guise of the Jew-Jesuit-Communist-Terrorist Leo Naphta) so notoriously complained, the imperial bourgeoisie has in its decadence abandoned Mann’s Herculean and forbiddingly successful efforts toward holistic meaning. I will do my best to say something, nevertheless. ![]() ![]() I would love to write 1000 or 2000 words in dismayed praise of The Magic Mountain, this magisterial 1924 classic of world fiction whose preface threatens that it may take the reader seven years to read, the same number of years that it narrates it took me five long weeks, and I feel as if Thomas Mann has used up all the words there are or ever will be, that I must simply sit, having finished this Alpine ordeal, in mute, awed disquietude. ![]()
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