Taikavuori (1924)

prestat per la bilioteca. acabat de llegir desembre 2020

Mageles - Elche - Diciembre/1995 ( )

taking a break

Hans Castorp, a conventional young middle-class man from Hamburg, has finished his engineering studies and is feeling run down, so he decides to make a three-week visit to his cousin Joachim who is undergoing treatment in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Swiss mountains. The head of the sanitarium, the Hofrat, finds a moist spot on Hans' lung, and a slightly raised temperature, and advises that he stay a few months until it is cured, but the spot remains moist, the temperature remains high, and Hans stays on, never really ill, but never quite well. Perhaps the Hofrat is drumming up business; perhaps Hans prefers the ease and luxury of the sanitarium to work and responsibility; perhaps Hans genuinely has TB. Hans' stay stretches to seven years, ending with the outbreak of WWI.

The sanitarium is many things. It is a microcosm of pre-war Europe, with patients from many countries; a sanctuary, a place remote from the troubles of the real world; a hospital, where tuberculous patients seek treatment to postpone their early deaths; a resort, where the young patients seek entertainment and excitement. Hans becomes more and more attached to life in the sanitarium, and to a fellow patient, the sensuous Russian Mme Chauchat, and begins to cut the ties with his former life.

Hans arrives at the sanitarium an indolent, thoughtless young man, whose unexamined opinions are those of his upbringing. During his sojourn on the mountain he is introduced to other ideas, and learns to think for himself. Settembrini, a fellow-patient, lectures to Hans on his philosophy of humanism, and urges Hans to leave the passivity of the sanitarium and return to an active life in the real the world. Naphta, a Jewish Jesuit, preaches a philosophy of disengagement with life, where illness and death are to be desired and the flesh mortified. The long philosophical arguments between Settembrini and Naphta often went over Hans' head, and mine as well.

There are so many threads in The Magic Mountain, and so many ideas, that you could read it again and again and find more and more each time. A knowledge of music would be a help, as would an acquaintance with classical mythology. Fortunately it is a comedy so when you are bogged down in abstraction, light relief is not far away. ( )

Our protagonist Hans goes to visit his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Alps somewhere around the turn of the last century.

I read Mann's Doctor Faustus at my choice back in high school and I had very similar reaction this time despite how long it's been: the writing is lovely, but only for about 50 pages. Its sheer density wears on me, and it takes a long while to move the plot forward. There's a lot of symbolism and literariness, and what that is saying is more interesting than the plot, but spending time trying to tease it out slows down my read and enjoyment even more. Worth reading, probably, but for me it was the kind of classic that quickly morphed into a duty read from being initially enlightening. I'm doing my best generally to not read purely out of a sense of duty, so when I had read to page 75 realized it wasn't working for me, I decided to stick with it to page 100. I got to a section break around page 102, and then I returned the book.

I wonder a bit if this book felt to folks of its era the way N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season and its series felt to me when I read it a few years back -- rich in blatant and clever political commentary disguised as literature, successful on two levels at once. The way we write today is different and my political & philosophical concerns are different from what they were 100 years ago in Germany; I suspect those cultural and contextual changes worked against my enjoyment of this book. ( )