The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) is a social comedy with tragic overtones, providing a portrait of Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. The novel recounts how an apparently simple North German engineer, Hans Castorp, comes to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, intending to visit his sick cousin, and ends up staying for seven years. He matures intellectually and emotionally, encountering love and death amid a cast of vivid characters who are portrayed with Dickensian humour and sophisticated irony, until he is jerked out of his torpor by the outbreak of the First World War.
This translation is accompanied by an accessible introduction by Ritchie Robertson, and detailed notes explaining the many cultural and historical references in the text.
Reviews
"Mann’s most emblematic novel, The Magic Mountain (1924), is equally understood as a novel of ideas, but the new translation by Simon Pare dispels its reputation as heavily philosophical. The first chapter is a sheer delight. [...] Positioning the reader as someone who has travelled on such trains, Pare begins by letting us imagine that we are accompanying Castorp on his trip up the mountain. The tone is bright, fresh, even sprightly, conveying the sense of excitement as the train climbs ever higher, offering promises of new sights and unexpected adventures. [...] Any concerns that we might harbour as we begin reading this thick, forbidding book are immediately dissolved. [...] The reader, like the protagonist, is drawn in." —Judith Ryan, Times Literary Supplement