![]() ![]() ![]() The entire work is suffused with sly and gentle humour, making it an absolute delight to read. ![]() ![]() Indeed, Hans positively revels in his status as one of the “horizontal”.If this all sounds a little grim, it is worth reiterating that The Magic Mountain is essentially a comic novel – albeit a comic novel dealing with the darkest of subjects. There is a chilling ambiguity as to just how much of Hans’s illness is genuine and how much the result of “going native”. What was intended as a stay of a few weeks stretches into. For The Magic Mountain is a work of sick-lit par excellence: a novel that convincingly portrays illness as a state of mind as well as of body here, illness is decidedly centre stage, and the plot – what there is of it – almost incidental: Hans Castorp, a naive young engineer, travels to the International Sanatorium Berghof high up in the Swiss Alps to visit his ailing cousin. The ideal book to keep you company on the long winter nights, when whichever flu bug is doing the rounds has gained the upper hand and forced you into a sneezing retreat to your sickbed. Set in a tuberculosis sanatorium during the years immediately prior to the Great War, this book is many things: a modernist classic, a traditional bildungsroman, a comedy of manners, an allegory of pre-war bourgeois Europe, and – perhaps most importantly. “.Mann’s real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic. All pages are in fine condition with the normal light browning to the page edges, the volume is exceedingly tight and the spine perfectly square. ![]()
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