![]() All the patients are living with tuberculosis or similar conditions many arrive expecting their treatment to be swift and straightforward, but end up staying for many years. ![]() The action is set in House Berghof, a sanatorium in the Swiss mountains (Mann stayed at such a sanatorium in Davos in 1912). Mann specifically associates this novel with the Quester legends in search of the Grail, which stands for knowledge, wisdom, consecration, the elixir of life.Ī ‘novel of ideas’, therefore: but these ideas are embodied in a particularly distressing and graphic context. ![]() Originally published in 1928, it is what the Germans call a Bildungsroman, the story of the educational formation or initiation of a young, usually naive hero. In his note on ‘The Making of The Magic Mountain’, written 25 years after the novel’s publication, Thomas Mann makes of his readers a ‘very arrogant request’, that it should be read not once but twice, in order for the richness of its composition to be fully appreciated (unless it really has been a boring experience, in which case the reader is excused …). Mann himself thought that you really must read The Magic Mountain…twice! ![]() Michael Kirwan SJ recommends this story of a quest for authentic wisdom, a crucial part of which is an engagement with the sickness that pervades the novel, acting as a metaphor for pre-War Europe. Published in 1928, Thomas Mann’s tale of life in a Swiss sanatorium sees its protagonist being pulled in two opposing directions as he struggles to discern the essence of the human condition. ![]()
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