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.
Acclaimed translator John