thomas mann's "the magic mountain"

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.