The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)

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.