"Morten Hi Jensen's approachable and informative study of The Magic Mountain positions Mann as a writer who was contradictory to his core: an artist who dressed and behaved like a businessman; a homosexual in a conventional marriage with six children; an upstanding burgher obsessed with death and corruption. Very much the kind of man who would send someone a book and tell them not to read it."
"Despite the doubts Mann expressed to Gide, The Magic Mountain a very strange, very long novel was embraced throughout Europe, and three years later in America, too. Its publisher there ignored the strangeness and proclaimed its use value for the practical life of modern man. While that makes it sound like Jordan Peterson-style cod philosophy, in fact it stands alongside In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities and To the Lighthouse as one of the summits (apologies) of literary modernism."
In 1924 Thomas Mann wrote to Andre Gide that he would send a copy of The Magic Mountain but did not expect Gide to read it, calling it 'highly problematical and German' and 'of such monstrous dimensions' that it would not suit the rest of Europe. The novel, despite its strangeness and length, was embraced across Europe and later America. The Magic Mountain follows Hans Castorp's extended seven-year stay at a Davos tuberculosis sanatorium. Mann began it in 1913 as a novella yet finished it after more than a decade, as World War I transformed the book's scope and Mann's political outlook from conservatism to support for the Weimar Republic.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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