The Magic Mountain

By Thomas Mann
Translated by John E. Woods

"In Mann's work the historic and contemporary retains its outsideness. He is a Wagnerian spellbinder, a mythmaker, but the myth always refers back to the real world." —The New York Review of Books

"The Magic Mountain taught me that big ideas have vitality, that intellectual life could make for great storytelling, and that the map of an age could be found in the personalities of the people who lived it, lessons that I carried into the writing of history. But the truth is, I have returned again and again to The Magic Mountain because the characters who inhabit it are such delightful company."—The American Scholar

"[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing."—A. S. Byatt

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelist, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. In The Magic Mountain, 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.

To this hermetic yet intrigue-ridden world comes Hans Castorp, a "perfectly ordinary" young man who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying seven years. For on the Magic Mountain, Hans will succumb to both the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. 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.

Also available in German.

Paperback
706 pages
Vintage International, 1996
Originally published in 1924
5.2 x 1.2 x 8 inches
ISBN 9780679772873
Existentialism, Satire, Historical Fiction