
by Thomas Mann
Translated from: German
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: November 1, 1924
Genre: classic
Pages: 706
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 Big Reads
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 is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.
At the end of 2024, when I was contemplating my 2025 reading plans, I decided that I would select six “big books” (i.e., books that were over 600 pages) to read this year. The six that ended up making the cut were:
- Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
War and Peaceby Leo TolstoyThe Magic Mountainby Thomas Mann- Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset (this is actually 3 books, but I bought the omnibus edition, so I’m treating it like 1 book)
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
I’ve read to the midpoint of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and while I do intend to finish it, I very definitely bogged down. It’s a very long book (1181 pages) and it’s non-fiction/travel/memoir, which is a genre that I find troublesome. My reread of War and Peace, while undocumented at this point, is also complete. I plan to write a post fairly soon.
Which brings me to The Magic Mountain. This is a chunky read, albeit not so chunky as either W&P or BL&GF, at about 700 pages. It took me about a month to read it – I started it on April 28, and finished it on June 1. I found it to be between W&P and BL&GF in terms of readability. I love chunky Victorian era novels with sprawling casts covering epic events, and while W&P wouldn’t be considered “Victorian,” being Russian, it was published during that era. I find that type of novel both enjoyable and readable.
The Magic Mountain is . . . what . . . modernist? Post-modern? I dunno – I’m not a critic and I’m bad at that sort of analysis. Nonetheless, it was an easier lift for me that BL&GF because I do much better with fiction than I do with NF.
It always feels vaguely ridiculous to me to rate a classic book – who am I to decide if The Magic Mountain is one star or five stars? I’m perfectly comfortable rating the newest Michael Connelly, but it seems pompous to start assigning star ratings to books that have already managed to stand the test of time as classics, about which entire additional books have been written by scholars, especially when, as is the case here, I feel like I got about 35% of it. So, there you go. I gave it 3 1/2 stars. Make of that what you will.
Sometimes I read a book and I think I will get a lot more out of this when I reread it. In the case of The Magic Mountain, I’m sure that I would get a lot more of it, if I reread it. Nonetheless, I doubt that I will ever reread it. It was too internal, too ambiguous, too “think-y” for my taste. I’m not a reader that requires action or a lot of plot, but I am a reader who wants to feel like the characters could be real people. This book felt like a giant allegory, where ideas were given flesh and turned into characters expressing archetypes, and, unfortunately, I neither enjoyed nor was I interested in the allegory or the archetypes. To say that nothing happened in the first 600 pages is accurate. Mann’s use of time is interesting, from a technical standpoint, but, at the end of the day, I just found the whole thing vaguely annoying.*
So, I’m glad that I read it. It wasn’t a struggle, and I never felt compelled to set it down, but this was a one-off for me.
George Packer, who writes for The Atlantic, and who also wrote a book that I really liked when I read it in 2020 (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America) wrote a piece about The Magic Mountain for the centenary last November, which I thought was great, even though he got a lot more out of the book than I did. So, if you want to read a different perspective, you can find it here.
*Having said this, I did find it interesting that the arguments between Settembrini and Naphta were sort of like listening to Ezra Klein argue with Steve Bannon. So, there is a relevance here.