num_pages: 716
description: Written by the most important figure in German literature in the first half of this century, The Magic Mountain is in Mann's own words 'a dialectic novel'. The seeting (like that of his earlier Tristan)is a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps; and it is into this rarefield and extra-mundane atmosphere, devoted to and organized in the service of ill-health, that young Hans Castorp comes, intending at first to stay for three weeks but remaining seven years. With him are a cosmopolitan collection of people: an Italian liberal, a Jew turned Jesuit, a doctor, a seductive Russian woman, and his cousin Joachim who desperately longs for action and returns to the 'lower realities' of the world, only coming back to the sanatorium to die. Their occupation is discussion, and in this they indulge relentlessly and with an Olympian arrogance and detachment from the outer world. But love, war, and emotions all affect and influence their conversation and they are indeed a microcosm and symbol of the pre-First-World-War society below them--of a sick Europe.The Magic Mountain won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
language: English
title: The Magic Mountain
titlecomplete: The Magic Mountain
characters: Joachim Ziemssen, Ludovico Settembrini, Hermine Kleefeld, Clavdia Chauchat, Hans Castorp, Pieter Peeperkorn
genres: Fiction, 20th Century, Classics, Philosophy, German Literature, Nobel Prize, Germany, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 47405
places: Switzerland, Hamburg, Germany, Italy, Davos
awards: awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize
category: John E. Woods
publisher: Penguin Books