The Magic Mountain

One of the greatest works of twentieth-century European literature, in the definitive English translation ‘Home and a settled life not only lay far behind, but also, and more importantly, they lay fathoms below him, and he was still climbing’ It is summer time in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, an ‘ordinary young man’, has arrived at an exclusive sanitorium for a brief visit to his convalescent cousin. Once there, time will lose its familiar contours, as Hans himself falls ill and abandons himself in an intoxicating landscape of dreams, beauty and eternal snow. The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann’s masterpiece: a Bildungsroman that is also an allegory of Europe before the devastations of the First World War, and a mysterious meditation on time, art, sickness and death. Translated by John E. Woods

'Hans Castorp filled his lungs with the pure mountain air--this fresh, light atmosphere that was so easy to inhale and held no scent of moisture, no content, no memories...' 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is accompanied by an accessible introduction by Ritchie Robertson, and detailed notes explaining the many cultural and historical references in the text. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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. (Cover may vary) 'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian 'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator

'Hans Castorp filled his lungs with the pure mountain air--this fresh, light atmosphere that was so easy to inhale and held no scent of moisture, no content, no memories...' 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. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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. (Cover may vary) 'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian 'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, 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. 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.

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.

"The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written." - The Guardian With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. "Mann was a master of this genre, in private life as in his fiction." - The London Review of Books "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 "Mann's sense of vulnerability modifies his temptation to abstraction; his awareness of the tawdry and shameful humanizes his concentration on the very act of art. He is saved by the perverse, by the knowledge that comes from having looked at the lost. For this his greatness, threatened by its own energy, still inspires awe and love." - The New York Times "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 "Long acclaimed as a masterly synthesis of the intellectual history of early 20th-century Europe and for its prescient scrutiny of elements in the German national character that had, and would again, find expression in the calamitous form of the world war." - Kirkus "Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love" - Jonathan Coe "A monumental writer" - Sunday Telegraph "The greatest German novelist of the 20th century" - Spectator "Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse." - Independent "Mann's real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic of 1924, The Magic Mountain ... The entire work is suffused with a sly and gentle humour, making it an absolute delight to read ... A book I return to every couple of years, The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written." - The Guardian

"The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written." - The Guardian With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps -a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. "Mann was a master of this genre, in private life as in his fiction." - The London Review of Books "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 "Mann's sense of vulnerability modifies his temptation to abstraction; his awareness of the tawdry and shameful humanizes his concentration on the very act of art. He is saved by the perverse, by the knowledge that comes from having looked at the lost. For this his greatness, threatened by its own energy, still inspires awe and love." - The New York Times "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 "Long acclaimed as a masterly synthesis of the intellectual history of early 20th-century Europe and for its prescient scrutiny of elements in the German national character that had, and would again, find expression in the calamitous form of the world war." - Kirkus "Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love" - Jonathan Coe "A monumental writer" - Sunday Telegraph "The greatest German novelist of the 20th century" - Spectator "Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse." - Independent "Mann's real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic of 1924, The Magic Mountain ... The entire work is suffused with a sly and gentle humour, making it an absolute delight to read ... A book I return to every couple of years, The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written." - The Guardian

In this masterpiece of intellectual fiction, Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann takes you to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community devoted to sickness that becomes a microcosm for Europe's prewar society. Young Hans Castorp planned a three-week visit to his tubercular cousin, only to find himself mysteriously drawn to the isolated mountain retreat. As his stay stretches from months to years, Hans falls under the influence of the remarkable residents: the humanist Settembrini, the nihilistic Naphta, and the captivating Clavdia Chauchat. Through their philosophical debates and seductive charisma, Hans's perception of time, identity, and meaning undergoes a profound transformation. Mann's rich symbolism and meditative prose explore the enigmatic nature of time, the seduction of intellectual surrender, and the fragility of Western civilization on the brink of catastrophe. The Magic Mountain stands as one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literature-a novel of ideas that continues to mesmerize and challenge readers nearly a century after its original publication. This edition, complete and unabridged, features footnoted translations of the French and Italian passages used in the novel, including the rather erotic conversation in the section "Walpurgis-Night." Newly designed and typeset for easy reading by Waking Lion Press, this edition is printed on acid-free, archival-quality paper for a long life in your personal library.

In this masterpiece of intellectual fiction, Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann takes you to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community devoted to sickness that becomes a microcosm for Europe's prewar society. Young Hans Castorp planned a three-week visit to his tubercular cousin, only to find himself mysteriously drawn to the isolated mountain retreat. As his stay stretches from months to years, Hans falls under the influence of the remarkable residents: the humanist Settembrini, the nihilistic Naphta, and the captivating Clavdia Chauchat. Through their philosophical debates and seductive charisma, Hans's perception of time, identity, and meaning undergoes a profound transformation. Mann's rich symbolism and meditative prose explore the enigmatic nature of time, the seduction of intellectual surrender, and the fragility of Western civilization on the brink of catastrophe. The Magic Mountain stands as one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literature-a novel of ideas that continues to mesmerize and challenge readers nearly a century after its original publication. This edition, complete and unabridged, features footnoted translations of the French and Italian passages used in the novel, including the rather erotic conversation in the section "Walpurgis-Night." Newly designed and typeset for easy reading by Waking Lion Press, this edition is printed on acid-free, archival-quality paper for a long life in your personal library.