Thus the novel takes place between about 1904 to 1914.Ī bit of challenge to the reader, however, is that Hans Castorp is definitely the character most talked about, yet one has the distinct sense that the novel really isn’t about Hans at all. At the beginning of WWI he finally leaves the sanitarium to become a soldier in the war. However, before his three weeks are up it is discovered that he himself has TB and he becomes a patient, living there for the next seven years.
But, now, after finishing school and before beginning work he plans a short three-week visit to his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen who is in a TB sanitarium in the alps.
He is an orphan of a modestly wealthy family and has some inheritance, but not enough to fully live on, so, as his guardian-uncle tells him, he will have to work. When the novel opens Hans is a 20ish young man who just finished a training course to prepare himself to work in ship building. Nonetheless, Mann hints that he is using Hans for other purposes:Ī man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. Hans Castorp is the character around whom the entire long novel spins, yet it isn’t really much about Castorp himself. At the same time throughout the novel, Mann is at pains to tell us that Hans Castorp isn’t any sort of special person – just a normal relatively average fellow. We learn the most minute details of Hans Castorp’s life and experiences, and thus I think I came to understand him better than virtually any other character I have read of in literature before. In reading the novel this becomes quite clear.
Thomas Mann tells us this will have to be a very long book, since he wants to tell the story of a person, and a person is built up very slowly by important details of his or her past. The Magic Mountain begins with a short but important introduction. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Grove Press, Inc., 1969 Book review - THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN By Thomas Mann THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN By Thomas Manm
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