The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The story of Hans Castorp we intend to tell here--not for his sake (for the reader will come to know him as a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man), but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us to be very much worth telling (although in Hans Castorp's favor it should be noted that it is his story, and that not every story happens to everybody)--is a story that took  place long ago, and is, so to speak, covered with the patina of history and must necessarily be told with verbs whose tense is that of the deepest past.

Today is the first day of the year 2024, a year that marks the 100th anniversary of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain. As soon as the bell dropped and the fireworks went off, I turned page one of this novel, at 850 pages itself a kind of mountain waiting to be climbed, and I began reading, so that I could finish by this afternoon, my first book of the year. Just kidding--I've been reading it for weeks, just enough pages each day so that I could finish it on the first. Though honestly, I had no idea until today that this was its 100th anniversary.

On top of the title mountain is the International Sanatorium Berghof, just outside the town of Davos in Switzerland. Hans Castorp arrives at the sanatorium one day, intent on visiting his cousin Joachim for three weeks. He stays for seven years. It doesn't take long for the doctors of the sanatorium to diagnose Hans Castorp with a mild illness--a moist spot on the lungs--but that's only half the story; in truth, the sanatorium is an appealing place, a world cut off from the "flatlands" below, a beguiling place like Brigadoon or Shangri-La. (In Hans Castorp's view, another beguiling aspect of the sanatorium is Frau Chauchat, with her Asiatic eyes, but perhaps she too is only a manifestation of the sanatorium's seduction, rather than a cause of it.) All too easily, Hans Castorp casts off his expectations of a shipbuilding career in the "flatlands" and embraces the life of the sick.

Before reading The Magic Mountain, I knew of it as a "comic novel" and a "novel of ideas," and it proved to be both. Its comic nature relies on the menagerie of personages who live alongside Hans Castorp at the sanatorium: the loquacious humanist Settembrini, the sinister arch-conservative Naphta, the outlandish Mynheer Peeperkorn, the idiotic Frau Stohr, and of course, Frau Chauchat. Among the medical staff, too, there are a number of strange figures, from the spiritualist lecturer Doctor Krokowski to the hideous Nurse Mylendonk to the enigmatic director of the sanatorium, Doctor Behrens. The characters are the primary pleasure, I think, of The Magic Mountain; the sanatorium, being slightly removed from the real world, seems the perfect home for them.

I knew, too, that part of the novel's reputation as a "novel of ideas" relies on the lengthy discourses between frenemies Settembrini and Naphta on subjects like humanism, religion, realism, science, and revolution. Settembrini is the novel's defender of the Enlightenment and rational progress; Naphta is a bitter and cynical Jew-turned-Jesuit committed to tradition and hierarchy. The two characters share much in common; both are poisonously long-winded, and seem to be fighting a kind of battle for Hans Castorp's soul. That in their discourses they often end up encroaching upon or even adopting each other's positions shows a blurring of the lines between their two worldviews. I don't know that I can describe their arguments with any more specificity than that, though; the truth is, when the two of them faced off, my eyes almost always glazed over. It was never clear to me how much we are supposed to truly consider the ideas they present and how much we are supposed to take it as sophistry. I imagine it's both: not only are the lines blurred between Settembrinism and Naphtaism, in The Magic Mountain the lines are blurred between wisdom and bullshit--which is itself a kind of wisdom. Still, I can't say that these parts, though famous, were my favorite sections of the novel, though I enjoyed the two characters very much. And I thought that the final showdown between the two was one of the novel's most surprising and memorable moments.

What interested me most about The Magic Mountain, I think, is what it had to say about illness, the body, and death. It's not clear at all that Hans Castorp belongs at the sanatorium; it's only a "moist spot" on the lungs, after all, and a very slight but persistent fever. We sense very quickly that anyone with an interest in extending their stay at the Berghof could find an excuse to do so, though others are clearly very sick. One thing that The Magic Mountain reveals is that illness--and health--are only labels, social constructs, as much ways of thinking about oneself and one's body than descriptions of any objective or measurable state. Settembrini advises Hans Castorp from the beginning to go back down to the "flatlands," knowing that illness has a kind of allure. Illness isolates and transforms; it turns the Berghof into its own world, different in kind from the "flatlands" below.

It also frees Hans Castorp up to live a life of the mind, trading in shipbuilding for philosophical disputation and what he calls "research." Like I said, it's not always clear what's wisdom and what's bullshit, but I was really taken with Hans Castorp's thinking about the life and the body, as when he repeatedly asks himself the question, "What is life?," and can only conclude that the spark that separates life from inanimate things remains unknowable and unidentifiable. The personages of the sanatorium, we are not allowed to forget, are also bodies, and unusual ones at that--like Hermine Kleefeld, who can whistle through the stomatic "pneumothorax" in her chest. There's something unsettling and fascinating about the way that Hans Castorp, after finally spending an evening deep in conversation with his beloved Frau Chauchat, persuades her to trade their x-rays. The portrait of Frau Chauchat that Director Behrens has painted is false, a bad lie, but to possess the x-ray is in way to possess Frau Chauchat herself. And these elements are emphasized by frequent forays into scientific and medical language that, despite being 100 years old, feels as familiar as the pamphlets in a modern doctor's office.

Illness, the body, death--these are big elements in The Magic Mountain, but it's one of those enormous novels that takes in just about everything, and it's impossible to say exactly what it's about. It's about politics, too, and war, and I suppose one way to read the sanatorium is as a microcosm of pre-World War I European society. It's a big novel, but also a great one, not necessarily in the sense of quality--though it is really rewarding and a lot of fun--but in the sense of vastness, of capaciousness. It's the kind of novel you might spend three weeks in--or sevne years.