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Title: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, H.T. Lowe-Porter ISBN: 0-436-27237-7 Publisher: Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: December, 1949 Format: Hardcover |
Average Customer Rating: 4.21 (57 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Mesmerizing Work
Comment: When you read the Magic Mountain, you understand what is intended by "classic." This book is mesmerizing and stunningly relevant to the times we live in. It truly conjures a life, a person's life and experiences in a way that no book I've ever read does. It has the immediacy of small details characterizing life in the Swiss sanitarium (making it real to the reader) coupled with the powerful and dramatic. It's got intellectual debate, feverish passion, crazed humor, dreamy hallucination, symbolism and the supernatural. Mann's narrative (and rumination on time - connecting the novel's warped time with our own time spent reading the book) has a way of sucking us in without letting us realize it, until it's too late; a way of making this novel a story of the reader's own life in the most unaccountably inventive manner. The portraits of the characters are as vividly tangible as the power of their words engaged in intellectual debate. And yet it runs deeper or as deep as the intellectual into a realm totally encompassing the reader and satisfying our minds and souls.
Rating: 4
Summary: Beautiful characters, boring prose
Comment: I've just been travelling for 2 months and decided to pack a ratty second copy of The Magic Mountain with me. A long 'didactic' novel, certainly enough sustenance for any journey. I managed to skim through most of the last half on a 10 hour train trip, so my impressions will be that of a tourist. A friend of mine who read it said it was a powerful work of philosophy. Having studied a certain amount of philosophy, I found certainly a whole wealth of philosophical, sociological and historical musings. But to my annoyance, none of the issues could really be developed into a strongly structured argument. Rather, I feel, Mann was trying to conjure up the intellectual milieu of the time. If anything, Mann, as artist was trying to describe the philosophy of the age from a point above philosophy, weaving a narrative of contradictory thoughts, if you will. I found the characters beautifully drawn and they rebounded off each perfectly. From the indolent, dreamy Hans to the intensely funny Settembri, as he pontificated what was basically an inarticulate philosophical position. The book was at its best in the heated discussions which cemented the foible and nuaced details of the characters. But...between these conversations, I found the prose rather lacklustre and pedestrian. Pages and pages of static descriptions of the sanitarium put me very close to catatonia, until I got woken up by the arrival of some characters. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the writings of some more contemporary writings, but couldn't the passage of time be evoked by ways other than the physical passing of time in the reading process itself? But let it be said, the coherence of the novel is staggering. The tightness of the structure is sustained over the course of this weighty novel. Now that is a feat to be admired.
Rating: 5
Summary: If there were ten stars...
Comment: Someone once asked what was The Magic Mountain about. After thinking for a little while, answered I: It's about Men, it's about Time, it's about Love, it's about Europe. Then it's sort of philosophy? he said. Yes, it's philosophy.
May this words help everyone who's looking everywhere for substantial and deep literature. Mann's Magic Mountain is just superb. A book that will shake and smack your mind. Like Dostoievsky, like Kafka, like Cervantes, like Greek Tragedy.
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Title: Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (Vintage International) by Thomas Mann, John E. Woods ISBN: 0679752609 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 July, 1994 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend by Thomas Mann, John E. Woods ISBN: 0375701168 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Death in Venice, and Seven Other Stories (Vintage International) by Thomas Mann, H.T. Lowe-Porter ISBN: 0679722068 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 1989 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: A Companion to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) by Stephen D. Dowden ISBN: 1571132481 Publisher: Camden House Pub. Date: 15 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Death in Venice and Other Tales by Thomas Mann, Joachim Neugroschel ISBN: 0141181737 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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