I first encountered Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain about four years ago. Reading the 700-page novel slowly, and in tandem with other books, it took me more than a year to get through it. But when I finally reached the end, I felt an urge unknown in my previous fiction-reading experience: to start the book over again at the beginning.
That didn’t happen, because other literary urges prevailed. But now, thanks to one of my book clubs, and after some hesitation I have read it again; and this time it only took me six months. I was quickly sucked back into the world of the Berghof – the imagined sanitorium near Davos, in the Swiss Alps, where nearly all of the novel (apart from a brief, early flashback to the protagonist’s youth in Hamburg) takes place.
My hesitation was partly due to having read it just a few years earlier; but it was also fueled by certain facts about this curious and unique book, which propelled Thomas Mann to a Nobel Prize in Literature when it first appeared in 1924. For one thing, not much happens in it. Certain characters die, but that’s not so surprising in a book set in a tuberculosis clinic in the early 1900s. Also, Mann’s prose style strikes one, at least superficially, as unexceptional. The novel is well-conceived and well-written; but despite the author’s frequent, wry comments on life in the Berghof, it doesn’t read like a “voice” novel, a unique way of looking at or describing the world. Apart from some magnificent descriptions of the natural alpine surroundings, it’s composed of sentences that are often curiously (and it seems, intentionally) pedestrian. Mann occasionally addresses the reader directly, but in a voice that’s blandly formal.
Another oddity– and one which I found harder to accept – is the fact that the main character, one Hans Castorp, is himself a rather pedestrian figure. Mann, in fact, goes out of his way to describe the young man (age 23 when the novel begins) as “mediocre.” This isn’t a moral judgment; but we see the book largely through the eyes of an unexceptional person. At times, he comes across as boring, excessively conventional, naïve, and even (although a competent prospective engineer) somewhat doltish.
Hans Castorp’s cousin and companion at the sanatorium, Joachim, is more extreme: decent but incurious, deeply repressed, enthralled by a military ethic, and largely if not wholly uninteresting. Beyond that, The Magic Mountain is virtually devoid of humor, and the romance consists of a protracted and ultimately fruitless infatuation in an uber-Victorian social setting. (Young Hans Castorp’s femme fatale, Mme. Chauchat, is one of the most intriguing figures in the novel, along with the two sparring intellectuals, Settembrini and Naphta, who hate each other’s ideas but can’t seem to get enough of them, while competing for Hans Castorp’s innocent attention.)
It is part of Mann’s genius that he triumphs over these self-imposed constraints to offer up 700 pages of thrilling prose. More than most works of fiction, The Magic Mountain is not about its characters or their fates. Rather, it’s a slow and deep meditation: a mood-based and philosophical novel that asks us to reflect on the basic furniture of human consciousness: life, death, and above all the mysterious phenomenon that connects these: time. I call it mood-based because the way Mann overcomes the mundanity of his characters is by sustaining a deeply contemplative narrative atmosphere. Few other great modern novels – including those by Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and others that compel us to confront consciousness more directly – achieve this.
The Berghof is in fact a strange and beautiful if not quite “magical” place. It is a purgatory for the mostly wealthy Europeans who can afford to linger there for weeks, months, or years, between life and death: a place where time both shrinks and expands as a function of the mind. It is also a human setting that affords rich insights about life, philosophy, psychology, and the human body.
It’s interesting to note that, despite the decadence of the Berghof, politics is largely missing from this panorama. Mann himself was a conservative in his early years, even a militarist during World War I, fueling a rupture with his brother Heinrich Mann, a distinguished novelist in his own right. But Thomas Mann underwent a significant transformation in later years, as he was writing “The Magic Mountain.” He became a democrat, fled Nazi Germany, and settled in California, where he died in 1955.
Mann’s gentle but deep probes of human nature and society make him one of the great modern novelists. Literary scholars could tell you far more about how he manages that achievement. Unlike the other great modernists, he doesn’t force us to confront human awareness in its stream-of-consciousness rawest form. But most would agree that The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann’s literary summit, and one of ours. With so much else on my shelves that I want to read, and time running in the wrong direction, I only hope I can somehow manage to read it a third time.