The Magic Mountain - (Vintage International) by Thomas Mann (Paperback)

About the Book

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. "The Magic Mountain" is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

Book Synopsis

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER - A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic.

With 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. The Magic Mountain 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.

To 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.

Review Quotes

"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." --New York Times Book Review

"[Woods's translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann's] ironically elegant prose." --Washington Post Book World

"[The Magic Mountain] 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

About the Author

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