thomas mann's "the magic mountain"

oh damn, deep cut

i like it so far though. i think settembrini and behrens will come to philosophical blows eventually but am afraid i'll have to wait like 400 pages for that to happen.

i like how hans catsorp thinks he is the ultimate respectable bourgeois when he is actually a repressed weirdo voyeur perv

He's an empty vessel who gets filled. He's like Leo Bloom in that respect.

bloom's receptivity is shown to be a unique/redemptive attribute though, even if he doesn't see it himself. idk about our hans. his openness doesn't cause him to feel empathy.

Well, he learns from those two (and from poor dull cute Joachim).

Alfred did Hans have sex with Clavdia during Mardi Gras?

How else could he get the x ray? She said she kept it in her room.

Asking for a friend

I don't remember. It might be in the French section.

Hm, i think it's supposed to be implied, but I have a hard time picturing Hans going through with that without dying from an anxiety attack

Unless he's not as much of a naif as he seems to be and it's all part of his insufferable learned helplessness act.

Dude better hurry up and mature in these last 200 pages

fucking bleak ending

i'm about fifty pages away from the end. imo classic

yeah, it's truly incredible.

wondering if clavdia and hans did it seems to be point-missing to a degree as hans' particular sensitivities and the movement of time in the sanatorium would suggest that any abrupt intimacy would be kinda like fucking, which is i guess why his later explanation to peeperkorn works ("why yes we were lovers, i asked to borrow her pen on mardi gras"). incidentally hans' affection strikes me as pretty queer in design, not just bc he confuses clavdia with a boy he loved in school.

also peeperkorn is one of my fav characters in all of literature what a ridiculous person

poor dull cute Joachim

kinda wish he were described like this at any point in the book

what's everyone's favorite sections? mine is the deeply horrible dream hans has when he gets lost in the snow

i love any of naphta's disquisitions but my favorite thing abt this book is the slow accumulation of method and ritual into like a totalized fugue. as if at its base instead of a "skeleton" of plot/narrative there's a really sick drone (in the musical sense) upon which all the modernist flourishes are built.

classic classic classic

Which is better, this or Doctor Faustus?

MM.

Joseph in Egypt was wondrous though.

a really sick drone

schopenhauer called it 'will'

a moist spot on my amp grill

don't sleep on buddenbrooks

last ten pages of this are so fuckin brutal

I think you'll like the Joseph novels, but you'll need to take a year off.

I think about this novel all the time. My favorite section might be the seance near the end where Joachim appears — the medical staff’s turn towars irrationalism is very ominous.

My dad tells me about this book quite often. His father could read German and asked for it as a present when my dad was young. He was disappointed to receive the translation. I've always been interested in reading it, but it sounds... depressing? Is it?

I mean yeah but it's early 20th century upper class Old Europe philosophical depressing, which I find easier to deal with than a lot of other types of depressing. Josh off the money at the start of this thread - obviously it's the perfect Winter book!

I think a lot about the narrator's memories of, like, the furniture and cutlery his grandfather had, how emblematic these kinds of memories are of a lost world and a profound generational gap. The house my grandparents lived in in Hamburg was, according to my parents, terrible kitsch in design but I never realised; it was where I got chocolates, it felt cozy.

Mann originally thought of Settembrini and Behrens as two satirical characters but as fascism began to rise he started to side explicitly with Settembrini - Behren's austere philosophy is clearly destructive but tbh there were few arguments where I didn't side with Behren; Settembrini just bloviates a lot about the brotherhood of man and hopes it sticks. I guess you could see him as the quintessential hapless liberal whose wishy-washy thinking allows for the rise of Behrens.

Mordy said he was going to start reading The Magic Mountain and having recently picked up a copy myself, it seemed a good time to begin! I haven't read this thread (and probably won't until I'm done), but will be recording my thoughts here diary-style just for the sake of it. Others should join in too if they are so inclined! I know nothing of the book other than what I've vaguely gleaned about Thomas Mann, and what I've guessed from other books.

Chapter 1 - Arrival

- The opening reminds me of Frankenstein (and to a lesser extent The Shining). Heading deep into some sublime unconscious, the privileged man removed from the security of his society etc
- Impressed immediately by the active presence of psychoanalytic thought: “Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state.” It’s like Winnicott’s writing about primary unintegration. The air holds “no associations”!
- Amazing how much depth of meaning he is cramming into every sentence. Wonder if he can continue like this
- I want a (faux) “alligator-skin hand-bag”
- Three pages in and nature already seems enraged
- The characters are afraid to show too much feeling…something tells me this book will be somewhat an undoing of that
- I bet Ari Aster has read this - something in the slightly off, uncanny interactions between Hans and his cousin who knows more than him about the mountain and its designs
- Buildings (man-made structures) are “porous”, permeable, impermanent. The forest is dense and opaque…(self-) knowledge itself?
- Dangers and extremities of nature are initially imperceptible. You get sick of looking at the snow…looking at the self is difficult and infinitely hidden
- I love the hysterical laughter at the prospect of psychoanalysis! That is a very appropriate and fearful response

Chapter 1 - Number 34

- Some very Tarkovsky-esque settings already. Lots of features described that still make little sense. Reminds me of Aphichatpong Weerasethakul as well. Close to sci-fi
- Our Hans housed in a room ‘between’ stoic, military cousin and ‘loud, offensive’ couple. Egoic centre
- Hans’ room is a blank slate to project into
- The horror of death haunts everything and Hans is excited by it. A sense of his having already left behind his youth, staring into the abyss.

I really hope this is not too irritatingly spoilery to anyone who sees it.

Chapter 1 - In the Restaurant

- Everyone struggling to keep their emotion under wraps. A fear of the danger within
- Building of a liminal space - time in the sanatorium is fast and slow, Hans is hot and cold, restlessness is “pleasurable and troubling”. A place of transformation. The imminence of letting go…
- They are suspended in a time supposedly outside of ‘progress’, unlike ‘down below’. This is pretty relatable to my current situation in life. A feeling of not being able to progress in the real world until I am better, as life hurtles by indifferently. It’s weird how books seem to present themselves at opportune moments. I’m sure others find this too?
- I love the introduction of the psychoanalyst next to the fire, and this:

…with him all formality was superfluous, and only jocund mutual confidence in place…

Omg I just looked ahead at some of the upcoming chapter titles! I am excited. I'm not in analysis at the moment and I've just fallen ill, so I feel like this is really the perfect time to start this odyssey.

Okay I'm not going to continue my note-taking here, but will check in with broader reflections later. Suffice to say though, this is an incredible book so far

I enjoyed reading your notes! It's been half a life since I read this, and I suspect re-reading it will blow me away again, albeit in a completely different way than the first time 'round. I should do this re-read, soon.

The characters are afraid to show too much feeling…something tells me this book will be somewhat an undoing of that

It's been a while for me too, but I'm curious to see what you have to say about this as you move through the novel.

This book is close to me for a couple of reasons. I read it because it's a favorite of someone I admire, but I also just relate to the emotionally isolating and disorienting experience of being in a "sanatorium" (in Germany, no less). Might re-read it now.

There's an uncharacteristic and funny moment toward the end of the novel that I'd also be curious to read your thoughts on.

- Amazing how much depth of meaning he is cramming into every sentence. Wonder if he can continue like this

hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I'm amused by how amused you are by that statement, Brad.

My reading experience with TMM was one of my favorites: on a Sanibel beach, as close to Hans Castorp and the mountain sanitarium as you can imagine.

TMM was the first novel I completed after a dry spell of, I don't know, like three years?

You want density? Check out Joseph and His Brothers, the subject of another amazing experience three years ago.

Oo there's an Everyman Library edition.

Lol at Brad’s laughter! What is going to happen...

Maybe I’ll keep chronicling my thoughts here. I do feel it’s kind of embarrassingly impressionable of me to have a brief heart/lung scare so soon after reading about the half-lung club. :| Joseph and His Brothers is on the list.

I’d like to hear more about how you relate to this book at some point Variablearea!

Ehhhhh

Probably not

Lol at Brad’s laughter! What is going to happen...

if anything he crams more and more depth of meaning into every sentence as the book advances. when you get to hans "playing god" you'll see what i mean

reading this book now couldn't be timelier

feel like the world is taking a rest cure

"This is the typical mode of experience of someone lost in a mountain snowstorm, woh never finds his way home," he thought as he struggled along, the phrases emerging in tattered, breathless fragments - discretion forbade his putting it more explicitly. "Someone hearing about it later imagines how ghastly it must have been, but forgets that illness - and my present situation is more or less an illness - batters its victim until they get along with one another. The senses are diminished, a merciful self-narcosis sets in - those are the means by which nature allows the organism to find relief. And yet you have to fight against such things, because there are two sides to them, they're really highly ambiguous. And your evaluation all depends on which side you view them from. They mean well, are a blessing really, as long as you don't make it home; but they also mean you great harm and must be fought off, as long as there is any chance of getting home--" (475)

Passion -- means to live life for life's sake. But I am well aware you Germans live it for the sake of experience. Passion means to forget oneself. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves. C'est ça. You haven't the least notion how repulsively egoistic that is of you and that someday it may well make you the enemy of humankind." (p. 585)

Has anyone written about the ways tmm anticipates WW2, prefigures it (or leads away from it) and similar ideas about the German type/personality as Mann saw it and Nazism? I do have this Mann essay on brother Hitler i have yet to read but i'm interested in critical/scholarly work on the theme too if anyone can recommend it?

“Guazzabuglio” what a word

Wehsal as proto-incel

You're way ahead of me (I'm at page 280 or so), but googling I've not found what you are after specifically. There are some jstor hits about Mann and anti-semitism, and Mann and the rise of fascism (which he strongly denounced).

Myself I'd be intrigued to see how WWI crept in the book, since he worked on it from 1912 to 1924. But I'm not far in enough to see the influence of WWI come to the fore, however obliquely, I think.

Still immensely enjoying the book btw.

An ok essay on Mann in the New Yorker (Alex Ross) though I never got on with The Magic Mountain, and I don't see that he was that much of Modernist, as I understand it. V good discussion of his Diaries (which need a reissue) and "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man" is sold by Ross discussing just how far apart from a lot of his work it is.

Notes is a...weird fucking book. I read its NYRB edition last May and had a few thoughts.

“What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure. It was the existence of the actually impossible-to-exist, of a half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing, in this restricted and feverish process of decay and renewal, upon the point of existence. It was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two, a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material—it was sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself, the incontinent form of being. It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition. It was a pullulation, an unfolding, a form-building (made possible by the overbalancing of its instability, yet controlled by the laws of growth inherent within it), of something brewed out of water, albumen, salt and fats, which was called flesh, and which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not spiritborne; nor, like the form and beauty of sculpture, conveyed by a neutral and spirit-consumed substance, which could in all purity make beauty perceptible to the senses. Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the somehow awakened voluptuousness of matter, of the organic, dying-living substance itself, the reeking flesh.

u go girl

Heavy stuff, fellas

What a weird, mysterious, confounding, magical book. Part of the magic (for me) was how it sustained my interest over 1200 pages despite having absolutely no plot to speak of and lengthy sections of extremely abstruse argumentation. I loved the ruminations about time, the highly satirical treatment (no pun) of the sanitorium, Hans' hallucination in the snow, some of the weirder tangents on the body, physics, etc. The Naptha & Settembrini stuff worked as a reductio ad absurdum of the art of rhetoric but was hard to take seriously as political argument, Naptha's positions especially were opaque, bewildering, and where understandable, hard to credit as a serious position in this day & age.

I'm currently reading, on page 260!! No spoilers!! But thanks for reviving, will want to discuss

i feel like joachim when he first welcomed hans to the sanitorium.

Haha. Also, this is, like the Decameron, a quintessential covid lockdown novel, but best to read now after the fact, in order to better process the experience.

which translation are you reading?

Johnny Woods

I'm cheap so I got a nugatorily priced ebook of the Lowe-Porter. There's a few clunkers ('covered with historic mould' at the start nearly put me off the whole thing, in the Woods it's 'covered with the patina of history') but it's mostly fine. If I ever re-read (maybe? Mann says I should!) I'd certainly get the Woods.

I read both, prefer Woods because he makes un-Manns Mann.

He's a Mann's Mann?

Finished yesterday. Some unfocused, uninformed thoughts:

I liked it a lot, despite the fustiness and conservatism of the author. Ultimately, it stands above whatever irritating personality and prose traits he has ("if it may be permitted to say so" and similar tedious add-nothing windbaggery) because he does have the patience to allow the work to unfold and to take on mythic dimensions; perhaps the ultimate lesson/design is tolerance, of himself, his own past conservative views, of time, of storytelling mannerisms, of German heaviness, of distractions - which ultimately add up to something much bigger, a mountain of details and small timeless or timebound moments in a life. This is also the magic, as well as the passing and varispeeding of time.

I'm guessing Naptha is Mann's way of dealing with the German revolution of 1918–1919, but as I'm sure many others have noticed, he actually seems to be more of a prototype Nazi in myriad ways. I don't fancy going into this too much, and I'm glad ILX isn't the kind of place where some fool will try to make connections between the Spartacists and the Nazis, so anyway I'll leave that one there. But from the brif background reading I've done, it seems Naptha may represent some of Mann's former views, and possibly he is trying to reconcile himself with some of Settembrini's through the writing of the novel. In any case, they are both highly memorable characters, and sometimes exceedingly strange, not always to Mann's credit (a communist Jesuit medievalist anarchist? Uhh, yeah okay) but obviously Mann's frequently stated point is that opposing categories are often not antinomies, and it seems he is approaching a Wittgensteinian position regarding language meaning there. In the mountain retreat, and in the mud of warfare these categories dissolve in utter meaningless anyway. It's often been stated, including in this thread, that this is a "novel of ideas", and I sincerely hope that that isn't Mann's ultimate intention or designation, because then I would think less of it. The old romantic vs bourgeois, West vs East, secularism vs religiosity guff we are often subjected to isn't developed in an interesting way, and is often embarrassing, outmoded (even for 1924 imo), or worse. I think, I hope, that Mann may have intended this, as it's often spouted by characters who don't seeem that in touch with the modern world and are ridiculous jumbles of caricatures. The only ideas that really mean a damn to me in this book are those about time, and the "genius of illness", which is what will stay with me, apart from the memory of being up there on the mountain with Hans and the other guests.

And that experience is the real heart of the book for me, the time spent with these guests, who are wonderfully well portrayed and tolerated.
I like very much that there was no overarching plot, that absolutely nothing came of the Chauchat romance, or anything else that was hinted at.
Hans' philanthropic vists, the gramophone...
It just all fizzled out, and to the extent that this is a pioneering book of modernism as I've seen said, it's that realism that makes some sense for that.

Special mentions: Han's skiiing expedition will stay with me, though the vision of the "healthy robust young Hellenes" was scarily like Nazi propaganda again. Helpful of Mann to illustrate the existing soil the Nazis planted in.

I believe Mann initially felt like both Naphta and Settembrini had their points but as the writing progressed he got more firmly on Settembrini's side - I remember when I read it Settembrini struck me as a fbpe liberal, just the kind of guy who has vague fuzzy notions about brotherhood between peoples and who will get swallowed alive by the nazis.

This piece is more on Musil but it gives a but more on what German language writers were up to then.

https://jacobin.com/2024/05/weimar-writers-fascism-book-review

Great posts all, making re-read parts of MM (which I found very boringly written), though as I posted above I am more inclined to read his "Reflections.."

Ultimately, it stands above whatever irritating personality and prose traits he has ("if it may be permitted to say so" and similar tedious add-nothing windbaggery)

I like these asides! they're obviously tongue in cheek, and often a deep vein of irony.

I've been reading 'The Magic Mountain: A Study of Thomas Mann's Novel' by Hermann John Weigand. (Available for free on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/magicmountainstu0000weig/mode/2up ) - it suggests that it's a bildungsroman with Hans standing in for Mann himself, and, despite the constant assertions of his mediocrity, thanks to his unique character and upbringing he is able by the end to become a 'genius of experience'. Putting it like that makes Mann sound like an egomaniac lol, I'm sure it's more nuanced really. It also goes into the forebears of the novel, the 'genius of illness' especially is an idea which seems to have a rich history in german literature.

I absolutely agree the heart of the book is Hans and the guests and the sanitorium - just enjoying it on a surface level. The gentle lampooning of the sanitorium is wonderful - a place full of people suffering from an infectious disease, that as a healthy person you can just visit, and hang out with them. All the rituals, the rest periods, the enormous meals! And how trustworthy is Behrens? Obviously TB is real and most of the guests are genuinely afflicted. But his pre-antibiotic treatments are obviously largely ineffective and I think we are meant to be somewhat sceptical of his diagnoses as well. Just how unwell is Hans really?

Supposedly you can take all the guests to be allegories of the various countries / powers of the prewar period. I'm sure some people would have fun getting into that - especially contemporaneous readers. And though Settembrini and Naptha are great characters their ideas are mostly flim-flam, the ideas about time (and how they're expressed, the medium matching the message) are the ones that stuck with me.