In the Library
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann, 1924
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 23 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter (1927)
- Original
- Original de
- Chapters
- Chapters 8
- Length
- Length 323k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Magic Mountain
A book famous for being long, slow, and densely philosophical, which is exactly the point, because its slowness is something Mann built deliberately so that you would feel a man’s seven lost years pass inside you rather than merely read about them.
The reputation of The Magic Mountain is that it is a vast, airless, intellectual novel where almost nothing happens, where two windbags argue about politics and philosophy for hundreds of pages while a young man lies on a balcony and takes his temperature. A good deal of that is literally true, and yet it gets the experience of the book completely wrong, because the slowness is not a flaw Mann failed to fix but the very thing he was trying to make you feel. This is a novel about how time behaves when nothing is pulling you forward, and reading it is the rare case where the strange, stretched, dreamlike pace is the meaning, not an obstacle in front of it.
If you like this, try
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
Proust builds the same cathedral of dilated time, but in a drawing room instead of a sanatorium.
£1.99
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy compresses Mann's seven years of confronting mortality into a single devastating novella.
£1.99
Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe
Mann returns to the same questions of European decline, but with a composer instead of an engineer and no mountain to retreat to.
£1.99
About the book
Up where the air is thin and the snow never wholly melts, a sanatorium keeps its patients to a routine of rest cures, temperature readings, and five vast meals a day, and time quietly stops behaving. Hans Castorp comes for a three-week visit to his consumptive cousin and stays seven years, never quite deciding to, the way an idle afternoon can swallow a whole season before you notice. The Magic Mountain does not describe that slippage; it performs it, lavishing a hundred slow pages on a single early week and then folding entire years into a sentence, until you have lost your own grip on how long you have been up here reading. The Berghof becomes a miniature Europe, feverish and brilliant and arguing itself toward ruin: the humanist Settembrini against the fanatic Naphta, a glass door that keeps slamming, an X-ray that shows Hans his own living hand as a skeleton. He absorbs the mountain's long, seductive education in death, and then the flatland calls him down into the guns of 1914.