Hans Castorp is twenty-three years old, a well-bred engineer from Hamburg, when he travels to the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin at the Berghof sanatorium. He plans to stay for three weeks. He stays for seven years.
The sanatorium is high above the world of ordinary time, work, and consequence. Its patients - drawn from across Europe, representing every tradition and intellectual persuasion - live in the peculiar suspended present of the chronically ill, where days blur into weeks and years pass without the usual markers of progress or purpose. Into this world Hans Castorp stumbles, receptive and passive and constitutionally unsuited for what is about to happen to his mind.
What happens is a full education in the contradictions of modern European civilization, conducted through the endless, brilliant, unresolvable arguments of two great antagonists: Settembrini, the Italian humanist who believes in reason, progress, and the democratic future; and Naphta, the Jesuit authoritarian who believes in hierarchy, death, and the necessity of violence. Between them, Castorp listens. So does the reader.
First published in November 1924, The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann's masterpiece and one of the essential novels of the twentieth century - a book about illness and time, about the state of European civilization on the eve of a catastrophe that has already happened by the time it is written, and about what it means to descend, finally, from a mountain and re-enter a world that has been waiting, all this time, to destroy itself.
By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929.
