The Magic Mountain: A European literary classic set high in the Swiss Alps

Name: The Magic Mountain: A European literary classic set high in the Swiss Alps
Rating: 3.5 (4 reviews)

Thomas Mann

May 2018 · Random House

4 reviews

Ebook

752

Pages

Eligible

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About this ebook

A visit to a Swiss sanatorium leads to seven years spent outside ordinary time.

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers

Hans Castorp arrives at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, intending to stay for just three weeks. But illness, routine and the strange atmosphere of the mountain draw him in.

Life at the Berghof is measured by meals, temperatures, rest cures and conversations. Around Hans gather doctors, patients and intellectual rivals whose ideas about progress, death, desire and civilisation begin to shape his own thinking. As his stay extends to seven transformative years, he falls in love and becomes absorbed by the mountain’s suspended world.

But below the sanatorium, Europe is moving towards the First World War.

The mountain air seems to clarify everything, then clouds it. Time stretches, arguments repeat, snow falls, bodies weaken, and Hans’s stay becomes a slow apprenticeship in the habits, temptations and evasions of a civilisation nearing crisis.

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'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian

'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator

A visit to a Swiss sanatorium leads to seven years spent outside ordinary time. As Seen on BBC Between the Covers Hans Castorp arrives at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, intending to stay for just three weeks. But illness, routine and the strange atmosphere of ...

Ratings and reviews

4 reviews

Kiran David

September 8, 2023

The problem is pages of French not translated should have been done as notes my low star rating is for this really sloppy in thus day and age

Krzysztof lipiński

November 19, 2023

Untranslated French pages.

About the author

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards he left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University of Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he recieved in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

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