{"product_id":"the-magic-mountain-isbn-9780679772873","title":"The Magic Mountain","description":"\u003cb\u003eNOBEL PRIZE WINNER • A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain\u003c\/i\u003e is an enduring classic.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo 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.“All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’s version...Woods captures perfectly the irony and humor.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Woods’s translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann’s] ironically elegant prose.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain\u003c\/i\u003e] 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.” —from the Introduction by A. S. Byatt\u003cb\u003eThe Modern Library\u003c\/b\u003e has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.\u003cp\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1912 Thomas Mann’s wife, Katja, stayed in Dr Friedrich Jessen’s ‘Waldsanatorium’  from March to September, suffering from a lung complaint. Mann himself visited her  for four weeks in May and June. During that time, he said, he suffered a troublesome  catarrh of the upper air passages, owing to the damp, cold atmosphere on the balcony.  The consultant diagnosed a ‘moist spot’ of tubercular infection, just as Dr Behrens  in the novel diagnoses Hans Castorp. Mann, however, did not stay in the magic mountain,  but hastened back to Flatland and Munich, where his own doctor advised him to pay  no attention. There is an ironic twist to this story which would have amused the  novelist — Katja, it appears was misdiagnosed, whereas Mann himself, in his post-mortem,  was indeed seen to bear the marks of an earlier tubercular illness.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is the  biographical germ of the novel. Its intellectual germ is related to Mann’s great  novella, \u003ci\u003eDeath in Venice. Death in Venice \u003c\/i\u003ewas a classically constructed tragedy of  the fall of a great artist and intellectual. \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain \u003c\/i\u003ewas to be the satyr  play that accompanied the tragedy — the comic and parodic tale of a \u003ci\u003ejeune homme moyen  sensuel, \u003c\/i\u003ecaught up in the dance of death, amongst the macabre crew of the sanatorium.  Both tales represented the fate of someone out of context, on a holiday visit, encountering  love, sickness and death with a peculiarly German mixture of fascination and resignation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWork on the novella was interrupted by the First World War. Mann spent the war years  writing passionately in support of the German cause. His ‘Thoughts in War’, his praise  of Frederick the Great as a man of action, his \u003ci\u003eReflections of an Unpolitical Man\u003c\/i\u003e,  are definitions of the German genius which, he asserts, is concerned with Nature,  not Mind, with Culture as opposed to Civilization, with military organization and  soldierly virtues. Culture is\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ecompatible with all kinds of horrors — oracles, magic,  pederasty, human sacrifice, orgiastic cults, inquisition, witch-trials etc. — by  which civilization would be repelled; for civilization is Reason, Enlightenment,  moderation, manners, scepticism, disintegration — Mind (Geist).*\u003cbr\u003e*T. J. Reed, \u003ci\u003eThomas  Mann: The Uses of  Tradition\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCulture is German. Civilization is predominantly French.  Mann opposes Frederick the Great and Voltaire as archetypes of the opposition. Voltaire  is a man of thought; Frederick, a greater hero, is a man of action. What Mann was  arguing was very much what most German artists and writers were arguing — the ‘decadent’  took strength from a sudden nationalist identification. There was, also, a personal  battle furiously pursued through the battle of ideas. Thomas Mann’s brother, Heinrich,  was against the war, and in favour of socialism, civilization and reason. In November  1915 Heinrich Mann published an essay on Zola, praising Zola’s defence of Dreyfus,  praising Zola as a civilized ‘intellectual’, castigating those in France (and by  implication those in Germany) who compromised themselves by supporting unjust rulers  and warmongers. There is a sense in which the wartime attitudes of the brothers mirror  the conflict between the civilized Settembrini and the spiritual nihilist Naphta,  in the novel as we read it. And in Thomas Mann’s Unpolitical Reflections (published  in October 1918) he makes a direct attack on his brother, in the figure of the \u003ci\u003eZivilisationsliterat, \u003c\/i\u003ewho claims that he sides with Life, Reason, Progress, and is against death and decay.  He quotes the author of ‘that lyrical-political poem which has Emile Zola as its  hero’ as saying he himself has ‘the gift of life . . . the deepest sympathy with  life’. Mann the ironist observes that ‘the problem of what ‘‘health’’ is, is not  a simple problem’.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn August 1915 Mann wrote to Paul Amann:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBefore the war I had  begun a longish tale, set in a lung-disease sanatorium — a story with basic pedagogic-political  intentions, in which a young man has to come to terms with the most seductive power,  death, and is led in a comic-horrid manner through the spiritual oppositions of Humanism  and Romanticism, Progress and Reaction, Health and Sickness, but more for the sake  of finding his way and acquiring knowledge than for the sake of making decisions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe spirit of the whole thing is humorous-nihilistic, and on the whole the story  inclines towards sympathy with death. It is called \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain \u003c\/i\u003eand has a touch  of the dwarf Nase for whom seven years passed like seven days, and the ending, the  resolution — I can see no alternative to the outbreak of war.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn March 1917 Mann  wrote again to Amman about the novel, this time describing the opposed figures of  a ‘disciple of work and progress, a disciple of Carducci’ and a ‘doubting, brilliantly  clever reactionary’, and qualifying his hero’s sympathy with death as ‘unvirtuous’.  He has to write his unpolitical reflections, he claims, to avoid overloading the  novel with ideas.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen the thousand-page novel was finally published in November  1924, Mann was reconciled with his brother after a bitter rift, and his attitudes  to German culture and the justification of war had changed. \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain \u003c\/i\u003eitself  was now a large and complicated work of art, working as a mixture of Dantesque allegory  and modern European realism, of German mythic culture and intellectual debate, of  Bildungsroman and farce.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe magic mountain itself is a myth and a symbol with  multiple meanings and charms. The German magic mountain is the Brocken, up whose  dangerous paths Goethe’s Mephistopheles leads the delinquent Faust, to join in the  lawless and phantasmagoric delights of the Witches’ Sabbath, or Walpurgisnacht. In  the Walpurgisnacht chapter of the novel Settembrini quotes \u003ci\u003eFaust \u003c\/i\u003e(as he often does):\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAllein bedenkt! Der Berg ist heute zaubertoll,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUnd wenn ein Irrlicht Euch die Wege  weisen soll,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo mu¨ sst Ihr’s so genau nicht nehmen.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut bear in mind the mountain’s  mad with spells tonight\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd should a will-o’-the-wisp decide your way to light,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBeware  — its lead may prove deceptive.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Walpurgisnacht of the novel is Shrove Tuesday  — the Munich ‘Fasching’ or licentious carnival feast of disorder. Mann marks the  curiously timeless passing of time in the magic mountain with feast days like Midsummer,  as well as fleeting seasonal weather. The hectic patients become phantasms and apparitions  — Behrens, the superintendant is compared by Settembrini to Goethe’s leading warlock,  Herr Urian.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut there are other, equally powerful magic mountains. There is the  Venusberg of Wagner’s \u003ci\u003eTannha¨}user, \u003c\/i\u003ein which the Thuringian Wartburg becomes the  secret dwelling of Venus, who entices young knights into its depths, and surrounds  them with sensuous delights, amongst nymphs and sirens. This Venus is a descendant  of an ancient German goddess Holda, originally the white lady of spring, a figure  not unlike the fairy queen who in British fairy story lures True Thomas into the  hillside, where, also, seven years appear to be only one day. The dwarf, Nase (Nose),  of Mann’s letter to Amann is also a fairy-tale figure, in a Romantic tale by Wilhelm  Hauff — a little boy imprisoned by an enchantress and transformed into a dwarf —  for whom also time passes at seven years in a day. The mysterious Clavdia Chauchat,  and Castorp’s increasing erotic obsession with her, are part of these Venus-dreams,  which shrivel and distort everyday reality.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGerman literature is a dialogue between  German classicism and German romanticism, and there is also a German-classical original  of the magic mountain. Nietzsche uses the precise word, ‘Zauberberg’ in The Birth  of Tragedy (1870-71) to refer to Mount Olympus. ‘Now,’ he writes, ‘the Olympian magic  mountain opens itself before us, showing its very roots.’ This ‘now’ in The Birth  of Tragedy, is the moment when Nietzsche quotes the wisdom of Dionysus’s satyr companion,  Silenus, who tells King Midas what is the greatest good of the human condition:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e‘Ephemeral wretch, begotten by accident and toil, why do you force me to tell you  what it would be your greatest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite  beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second  best is to die soon.’ What is the relation of the Olympian gods to this popular wisdom?  It is that of the entranced vision of the martyr to his torment. Now the Olympian  magic mountain opens itself before us, showing its very roots. The Greeks were keenly  aware of the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to be able to live at all  they had to place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHere is a very  pertinent concatenation of a satyr, the desire for death which tempts Hans Castorp,  and a mountain hutching illusory forms. Nietzsche’s argument in \u003ci\u003eThe Birth of Tragedy \u003c\/i\u003eis that the beauty of Greek tragedy derives from the satyr chorus, which was  originally  a religious ritual celebrating the dismemberment and eating of the dying god, Dionysus,  and later became the chorus, and the comic fourth satyr play which accompanied the  classical tragic trilogy of plays at the City Dionysia. Nietzsche’s text turns on  the opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysiac principles in Greek art. Apollo  goes with clarity, definition, individuality, dream and illusion. Dionysus represents  the drive to bloody dissolution, annihilation, and a strong and gleeful admission  of the terror and meaninglessness of life. Sophoclean heroes, Nietzsche tells us,  are Apollonian masks, which are the opposite of the dark circles we see when looking  at the sun. They are luminous spots designed to ‘cure an eye hurt by ghastly night’.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Birth of Tragedy \u003c\/i\u003ehaunts European culture. Freud’s \u003ci\u003eBeyond the Pleasure Principle \u003c\/i\u003e(1920) establishes a death drive, or principle of thanatos, to change his vision  of dreams as essentially pleasure-seeking. It was written partly in response to the  persisting dark dreams of the soldiers of the First World War, forced to relive horrors.  Mann plays with its ironies and ambiguities in many of his texts. Both Aschenbach,  in \u003ci\u003eDeath in Venice, \u003c\/i\u003eand Hans Castorp, have riddling dreams, directly drawn from Nietzsche’s  vision, which are turning-points in their respective stories.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAschenbach, the lucid  artist, begins his descent into madness when he meets the stranger outside the mortuary  chapel in Munich. This sharp-toothed person, with ‘an air of imperious survey, something  bold or even wild about his posture’, and looking exotic and strange, is surely the  figure of Dionysus who appears outside the little temple and greets Pentheus at the  beginning of Euripides’ \u003ci\u003eBacchae. \u003c\/i\u003eThe boy, Tadziu, with whom Aschenbach falls in love  in Venice, has a name that sounds like Zagreus, a name for the dismembered Dionysus.  The stranger god, with his panthers, and the cholera, both come out of the East —  as does the smiling Clavdia Chauchat, with her slanted Kirghiz eyes. Like Pentheus,  Aschenbach disintegrates and has a very precise dream-vision of the stranger-god,  with his flute-music, his rout of companions, ‘a human and animal swarm’ of maenads  and goats, who tear at each other and devour ‘steaming gobbets of flesh’. It is a  vision of the loss of self in the religious frenzy of the sacrificial feast.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHans  Castorp, in the late chapter, ‘Snow’, lost and wandering in circles, falls into an  exhausted sleep. Castorp’s dreamvision is at first a blissful and idyllic vision  of a classical Mediterranean landscape (based on a painting by Arnold Bo¨}cklin)  of beautiful and healthy humans working and playing in orchards, in meadows, by the  sea. But the dreamer is led into a temple where two old hags in the sanctuary are  dismembering a living child above a basin, and cracking its bones between their teeth.  The lovely order is intimately connected to the mystery of the dismembered god. This  vision causes Castorp to understand that the ‘courteous and charming’ people are  intimately connected to ‘that horror’. They are interdependent, health and horror.  Castorp is the object, like Everyman, of a tug-of-war between the two philosophers,  the life-loving, reasonable Settembrini and the destructive, voluptuous and malicious  Naphta. In the snow he sees that neither is right. What matters is his heart-beat,  and love.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain, \u003c\/i\u003eas well as being a German myth, is a parody of the  Bildungsroman, in which a young man goes out into the world, and discovers his nature  through his encounters. The two talkative opponents are pedagogues, representing  visions of human nature and the world which were tested in Thomas Mann himself during  the 1914-1918 war. Settembrini is partly attractive, and partly, as Castorp sees  him, an organgrinder playing one tune, resolutely unaware of its limitations. Naphta,  Jew, Jesuit, connoisseur of the irrational, the anarchic, the nihilistic, is closer  to Mann’s own vision, which itself is closer to Nietzsche’s strong pessimism than  to the hopefulness of the Age of Reason. An enormous proportion of the novel consists  of bravura descriptions of battling ideas, and it is fashionable now to dismiss Mann  as a ‘dry’ (even desiccated) ‘novelist of ideas’, as though that description meant  that he did not understand human feeling, or passion, or tragedy. It is possible  to argue that novelists in general give disproportionately less space to intellectual  passions than their power in society warrants. People do think, and they do live  and die for thoughts, as well as for jealousy or sex, or erotic or parental love.  As that wise critic, Peter Stern, remarked drily, ‘seeing that modern men are as  often intellectuals as they are gamekeepers or bullfighters, Mann’s preoccupation  is, after all, hardly very esoteric’. It is perhaps worth making the point that my  own early readings of \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain, \u003c\/i\u003eimpeded by scholarly earnestness, trying  to get my bearings in an ocean of unfamiliar words, and baffled by an inadequate  translation, quite failed to see how \u003ci\u003efunny\u003c\/i\u003e, as well as ironic and subtle, much of  the argumentation and debate is. The nature of our relation to the comedy changes  as Castorp educates himself out of the extraordinary bourgeois unreflecting innocence  in which he begins. He begins to be amused, and we readers begin to share his amusement,  rather than laughing at him, or observing him from outside his world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is necessary  to say something about the late appearance of the Personality, Mynheer Peeperkorn,  a figure somewhere between Dionysus and Silenus, who is so little part of the verbal  argument that he can never finish a sentence. The idea behind him is that here is  someone who does not discuss living and dying, but simply lives and dies. He \u003ci\u003eis \u003c\/i\u003ewhat  he is, and claims Clavdia because he is alive. To take him seriously as someone who  transcends the dialectic between the disputing angels of ‘life’ and ‘death’ we need,  I think, to see him in terms of Thomas Mann’s essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, published  in 1922.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis complicated, passionate, witty essay compares the two great writers  as earthy writers, comfortable in their skins, possessed of a natural egoism which  is at the centre of their power as writers and as observers of the earth they live  in. He uses for both of them the legend of the giant Antaeus ‘who was unconquerable  because fresh strength streamed into him whenever he touched his mother earth’. Mann  tells tales of playing games called ‘Numidian horsemen’ with a room full of adults  and children. He recounts an incident recorded by Tolstoy’s father-in-law, Behrs:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey were walking about the room together in light converse one evening, when suddenly  the elderly prophet sprang upon Behrs’s shoulder. He probably jumped down again at  once; but for a second he actually perched up there, like a grey-bearded kobold —  it gives one an uncanny feeling!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the case of Goethe, Mann records, among other  things, his sensitiveness to weather conditions:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt was due to his almost exaggerated  sense-endowment; and became positively occult when that night in his chamber in Weimar  he felt the earthquake in Messina. Animals have a nervous equipment that enables  them to feel such events when they occur and even beforehand. The animal in us transcends;  and all transcendence is animal. The highly irritable sense-equipment of a man who  is nature’s familiar goes beyond the bounds of the actual senses, and issues in\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe  supra-sensual, in natural mysticism. With Goethe the divine animal is frankly and  proudly justified of itself in all spheres of activity, even the sexual. His mood  was sometimes priapic — a thing which of course does not happen with Tolstoy.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMann  contrasts this earthy self-possession with the spiritual ‘shadow-world’ of Dostoevsky  (‘exaggeratedly true’) and with Schiller, another ‘son of thought’. Schiller’s\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eessay,  ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ was described by Mann as ‘the greatest of all German  essays’. In it Schiller distinguishes between the ‘naive’ poet who has the plastic  energy simply to \u003ci\u003emake \u003c\/i\u003ea world (Shakespeare, Homer), and the ‘sentimental’ poet who  can only find a world through his own sensibility and reflections. Mann puts Schiller  with Dostoevsky:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e. . . the conflict between contemplation and ecstatic vision, is  neither new nor old, it is eternal. And it finds complete expression in, on the one  side, Goethe and Tolstoy, and on the other Schiller and Dostoevsky. And to all eternity  the truth, power, calm and humility of nature will be in conflict with the disproportionate,  fevered and dogmatic presumption of spirit.\u003c\/p\u003eWinner of the Nobel Prize for Literature A New Translation from the German by John E. Woods","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302698832101,"sku":"NP9780679772873","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679772873.jpg?v=1767740360","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-magic-mountain-isbn-9780679772873","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}