A review by dukegregory
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

5.0

New favorite Mann? I feel Death's scythe grazing my throat. This took me a bit over two months to complete, and I wouldn't have it any other way. The Magic Mountain tempers time via narrative, a cognizant and precise reconfiguring of temporal perception, in order to highlight and, thus, foreground time's passage in its objective and subjective formulations. As such, this novel of the ill and pseudo-sick (is everyone not just a little sick... are we not all in some way, shape, or form on the verge of mental-physical-political collapse?) presents a vision of wasted time: life is wasted time, a war waged between activity and passivity. What comes of this is a work that records the lead-up to WWI through extended allegory and nuanced archetypes, presupposes the tensions that will lead to WWII, summarizes and recontextualizes the legacy of European philosophy up to the point of the novel's initial release while emphasizing the simultaneous necessity and futility of thought (is thinking, in its own way, yet another vision of sickness/the passive?), vivisects the manner in which bourgeois life proceeds to be lived, dissects the enmeshing of life and death in quotidian experience as the clock ticks away, and stretches the limits of how much a novel can hold structurally. A high modernist behemoth. It's an experiential work, so I feel all my thoughts to be rather half-baked and insufficient. Mann's prose makes me laugh, evokes an immense breadth of emotionalities without relying on the saccharine, and challenges you to keep up with its interweaving of the feverish and the lackadaisical. A total slog in the best way: by design. I can't believe I've actually finished it.