![]() ![]() The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death. The journey begins with progressive trance, builds into proper psychedelic sounds, and ends with chill out and ambient. In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain, a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in German in November 1924, is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of twentieth-century German literature. It is only the imminent threat of the First World War that at last provokes him to return to the life he left so long ago. She leaves the sanatorium and Hans clings to his illness in orderto wait for her return. Hans falls in love with a beautiful Russian patient, Clavdia, who does not return his love. He loses all sense of time and gives himself up to a community with its own rules and morality. Before Hans can leave he is himself diagnosed with TB and ends up staying for seven years. Hans Castorp-such as the young man’s name-sat alone in his little grey-upholstered compartment, with his alligator-skin handbag, a present from his uncle and guardian.In 1907, Hans Castorp, a young engineer, travels to a sanatorium in the Alps to visit his tubercular cousin Joachim. You mount a narrow-gauge train and as the small but very powerful engine gets underway, there begins the thrilling part of the journey, a steep and steady climb that seems never to come to an end.įor the station of Landquart lies at a relatively low altitude, but now the wild and rocky route pushes grimly onward into the Alps themselves. Here, after a long and windy wait in a spot devoid of charm. ![]() You take the train again, but only as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station, where you have to change. It crosses all sorts of countries, goes uphill and down dale.ĭescends from the plateau of Southern Germany to the shore of Lake Constance, over its bounding waves and on across marshes once thought to be bottomless.Īt this point, the route, which has been so far over trunk lines, gets up. ![]() AN UNASSUMING young man was traveling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.įrom Hamburg to Davos is a long journey – too long, indeed, for so brief a stay. ![]()
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