The Magic Mountain

In January and February, I spent about three or four weeks rereading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (in German, because that’s my native language). It was a reread, because I read it ages ago in my  late teens or early twenties, when I had a Thomas Mann phase. I really didn’t like it then. It was way above my head at the time. I used to place a lot of importance on plot in my earlier reading years, more than I do now. Let’s face it, The Magic Mountain has next to no plot but oodles of complex discussions about culture and politics and whatnot.

This year I wanted to reread it, because I found out that 2024 is the 100th year anniversary of the book’s first publication. That little factoid gave me the first push to see if I would change my opinion about it if I read it again. Then I learned, through a short snippet on TV, that Olga Tokarczuk has written a novel called The Empusion that engages with The Magic Mountain in some way. Now, last year Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was one of my favourite reads. So I thought I’d make a project of reading both books and seeing how they interconnect. And I decided I’d better start on the Zauberberg early in the year, fresh from my vacation. Which I did.

Well, I enjoyed The Magic Mountain a lot more than I did all those years ago, but it probably will never be one of my favourites. I read it slowly (it’s not a book for rushing through) and felt that I understood a lot more. It’s stuck in my mind, mostly because I keep wondering how its themes relate to World War I – the book is set in the decade before the war and ends right as it starts.

It’s about a young man, Hans Castorp, who travels from his home in Hamburg to visit his cousin Joachim, who is staying at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Hans is a well-to-do orphan who’s just looking for a bit of a holiday before starting an internship (or maybe his first job) at a wharf after having gained his engineering degree. But then he is seduced into staying at the sanatorium himself for the following years (an incredible number of years, even after his cousin leaves).

An x-ray of Hans’ torso shows a few indistinct splotches that could be interpreted as tuberculosis or some other unspecific disease that needs the mountain air to be cured. However, it’s really that Hans has decided that the way of life at the sanatorium is very much to his liking – it’s all sleeping, resting, taking relaxing walks and eating five full meals a day. Reading, talking, listening to concerts every now and again. Maybe a leisurely excursion into the surrounding countryside. It’s a very seductive atmosphere (if you can afford it) and Hans is not really ill, so he can enjoy it. He feels freed from his familial and other obligations. The serious nature of some of the patients’ conditions is kept discreetly hidden, although at one point in the book Hans likes to visit the dying because it makes him feel elevated in some way (he can be a bit of a prick).

The other thing that keeps him on the mountain is an infatuation with a married woman, Clawdia Chauchat, who is taking the cure without her husband (conveniently far away in Kyrgyzstan) and who reminds him of an earlier schoolboy crush on a young lad who resembled her.

At the sanatorium, Hans soon becomes friends with and is mentored by one Ludovico Settembrini, an Italian scholar, author, and passionate proponent of Enlightenment values. And later still he is brought, via Settembrini (much to his chargin), into the circle of Leo Naphta, an ex-Jew Jesuit who embraces totalitarian Marxist views. Settembrini and Naphta are antagonists with each trying to pull Hans over to his side. Hans, however, stays friends with both and has his doubts about each of their ideologies. Their enmity eventually comes to a dramatic climax.

Towards the end of the novel, Hans is also introduced to a rich Dutchman, Peeperkorn, from the colonies, who suffers from bouts of malaria and who seems to want to celebrate all life’s joys while also keeping everyone on their toes due to his violent fits of temper. He is Clawdia’s new lover and therefore Hans’ rival.

The book is like a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel), with a young man being introduced to the arts, culture, and politics, as well as sex (in theory?) and love. However, from the first, Hans, despite being an agreeable people-pleaser, keeps his own counsel and private opinions and only adopt his mentors views as far as suits him. He’s finished a degree in engineering, he’s not totally unformed. He’s quite stubborn, too. It seems that he isn’t transformed very much at all by his contact with his mentors and his involvement in their endless discussion about everything and nothing. All the new knowledge also doesn’t help him at the end, when he is forced to leave his magic mountain retreat at the beginning of WWI when the novel ends.

Anyway, before the end, the mountain has already lost much of its allure. It seems that the inhabitants of the sanatorium become jaded with their superficially pleasant lives, more aware of their mortality, and they succumb to strange obsessions and bad temper (including violence). Even Hans seems just to stay on because of inertia and not wanting to leave his friend, Settembrini. Although, inevitably, driven by the forces of the times, he must leave.

Near the midpoint of the novel, Hans embarks on a somewhat dangerous adventure during which he falls into an exhausted sleep for some minutes and has a dream in which he has a revelation. Sadly, he forgets this revelation once he returns to his life at the sanatorium. Is enlightenment only possible in dreams?

Above I said that The Magic Mountain will probably never be one of my favourites. Why probably? Somehow, I can’t quite make up my mind about the novel. I didn’t enjoy reading it all that much (although I didn’t hate it either), but afterwards it stuck with me. I keep thinking about it. It’s fascinating. I may have to reread it again in 10 years or so.

What I really didn’t like was that the novel doesn’t have any well-fleshed out women characters at all. The female patients at the sanatorium are all either stupid or superficial (or both). The only strong character is Hans’ cousin’s mother, but she has a very small appearance. There’s Clawdia, but she’s mostly an object for Hans to moon over (and isn’t even in the story for half the time). So, I’m really hoping that Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Empusion will differ in that respect. Tokarczuk is a Polish writer (a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature) and The Empusion is available in a German translation. But as I enjoyed the English translation of Drive Your Plow… so much, I’m holding out for the English translation, which is supposed to come out in September. According to Amazon it’s “A Health Resort Horror Story”. Sounds intriguing!

May Reading

May was quite a good reading month. I read a couple of novels and some nonfiction that I really enjoyed and even some poetry. Here’s the list:

The Sagas of the Icelanders (Penguin Deluxe Edition)

I finished the first saga in the collection, Egils Saga and the next one, The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal and am now in the middle of the Saga of the People of Laxardal. I’ve not quite caught up, but my reading buddy also isn’t caught up, so that’s ok. Reading these sagas casually one gets the impression that they are a little like chronicles. A lot of things happening one after the other, with a large cast of people. It’s hard to remember the details. There are always conflicts, voyages, marriages, and other allegiances. Every now and again people do sorcery (that is, black magic) which is apparently believed to be real. There are also ghosts, in the sense of the unquiet dead haunting places or people. Women sometimes play prominent roles. It’s hard to remember what happened to whom and in which saga, but it’s an interesting read.

Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

Like last month, I read a couple more of these wacky short stories. I usually read them when I’m with mum in the waiting room of some doctor or other, so it’s taking a while. Also, they are so weird that I can’t read a lot of them at once. I really like them, but don’t want to read them all at once.

Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and His Brothers)

I didn’t continue with the series in May but may do so in June. I haven’t decided yet.

Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

A re-read, as I’m taking part in the readalong hosted by Katie Lumsden at Books and Things. I like the character of Barnaby Rudge (junior – there’s also a senior, but he’s a nasty evil bloke) and his raven, Grip. When I consider my ranking of Dickens’ novels from 2020, I think I’ll move Barnaby Rudge up one step, to fourth place (in the final ranking). This time around I specially noticed the discussions in the novel about the harsh criminal justice system of the times. People were executed for minor crimes, especially, of course, poor people. Books and Things has a good review video about the novel. My review from my first time reading it is here. Next up is Martin Chuzzlewit, which I didn’t care for. Maybe I will like it better the second time around. I may not get started in June, as we have until the end of July to read it.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea

My book club read this book. It’s the story of two men, an older and a younger one, who are loosely related who are more or less involved in a family feud. They were both born in Zanzibar and the older man, Saleh Omar (who also uses other names) has applied for asylum in the UK while the younger, Latif Mahmud has become a university lecturer, also in the UK. By chance, the two meet in the UK and tell each other the story of their lives (and their view of the family conflict). The family conflict takes place in the context of British colonial rule in Zanzibar and the unrest that followed independence. There’s also an interesting part where Latif moves to East Germany (of all places) to study dentistry. Saleh’s experiences as an asylum seeker are also a topic narrated in the novel. Some of the events in the novel are quite dark and both men seem rather unhappy and unsettled, but through the telling of their stories, they build a connection. Also included in their little group is Rachel, Saleh’s legal refugee advisor.

I’d never heard of Gurnah, but he’s a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. This doesn’t automatically mean anything, but in this case, I really loved the novel. It’s subtle, sometimes ironic, sometimes tragic, and really well written. For once, a book club choice that I liked. I want to read more of Gurnah’s works.

Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

This is another novel by a Nobel Prize winner, a Polish author. I was looking for novels written by international authors (that is, not English or German) and thought that this one sounded intriguing. It was great. It’s narrated in the first person by an older woman who lives in a very rural part of Poland and who investigates some murders happening in her community. The woman (her name is only revealed later in the novel, so I don’t want to mention it) is a very strange character who believes in astrology (although she had a very technical, scientific job before retirement) and who is very critical of how animals are treated. She is especially against hunting and poaching. She is also very much into the works of William Blake. The novel teases the reader. You think that you know who the murderer is, but then you think it’s too obvious, but is it? The narrator and main character starts out as a rather curmudgeonly sort, without many friends but gains friendship and great loyalty from a select few (others hold her to be crazy). Tongue in cheek, I’d say it’s the perfect novel for vegans or other animal rights advocates. I definitively want to read more by this author. The novel is my favourite read in May.

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy

The third and last novel of the Imperial Radch series, a reread. Breq, the ex-ancillary, struggles with her relationship with the ship (also an AI) of which she is the captain. The conflict between Breq and the Lord of the Radch is brought to a very satisfactory, unusual, and creative close. It would be lovely to read more about what happens after, because the ending really overthrows a main concept on which the Radch society relied so it’s interesting to think about how things might develop after the events of the trilogy. The author has written at least one other novel set in the same universe which I will eventually read.

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Giroux (ed.), One Art: Letters

I haven’t read many collections of letters (I’m still stuck in the middle of a collection of Charles Dickens’ letters that I probably started in 2020), but this one was really engaging. It was almost like reading an autobiography. Since Bishop talks a lot about her poetry in the letters, I also read her poems (she did not write that many).

Elizabeth Bishop, Poems: The Centenary Edition

Some of the poems I liked, some I didn’t understand, and some didn’t do anything for me. A book to revisit and dip in and out of (same goes for the Letters).

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and Jessica J. Lee (eds), Dog Hearted: Essays on Our Fierce and Familiar Companions

I stumbled across this short essay collection by chance and picked it up as it is about writers and their experience with dogs and I’m a dog lover myself. I found it just middling. It had one essay that I liked more than the others and one striking incident that I can’t get out of my head (a Husky catching a sparrow that zapped past her nose and swallowing it whole, feathers and all) but otherwise it was slightly disappointing.

Roald Dahl, Matilda

A classic. I’ve seen the film more than once, but never read the book. It’s very enjoyable. About a very clever young girl who isn’t appreciated by her over-the-top dumb parents but finds a friend and supporter in her primary school teacher. Matilda is a great lover of books, too. It’s imaginative and magic, like much of Dahl’s work. I liked it.

Craig Johnson, The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished

Crazily, I started a new crime series instead of continuing ones that I’ve already started. The series is set in rural Wyoming. The protagonist is a sheriff nearing retirement called Walt Longmire. There’s a TV series but I haven’t seen it. The novels are fun. I like reading crime novels set in  for relaxation and I’m sure I’ll eventually read the rest of the series.

I’ve rather fallen out of the habit of writing longer and more detailed reviews of the books I read. Maybe I will manage to start that again this month. We’ll see.