The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann · 1924
Mann turned a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos into a theater for all of European civilization's ideas before WWI. The novel is encyclopedic, philosophical, funny, and exhausting in the way that a long life is exhausting. It also happens to be one of the great examinations of time: how we live in it, waste it, measure it.
The case against
Settembrini and Naphta debate humanism and terror for chapters at a stretch while Hans Castorp, the most passive protagonist in the European canon, takes his temperature and falls in love with an X-ray. Mann makes slowness the subject, which excuses nothing about how it reads; seven hundred pages up the mountain, and the joke about time is mostly on you.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
