Finished: The Magic Mountain (Mann) I liked this book...but I really wanted to LOVE this book! So many authors include it on their lists of the top ten books ever. This book, along with Buddenbrooks, helped Thomas Mann win the Nobel Prize for literature. I really wanted to love this book. I think the problem is that I loved the story, but once again, as in other books, there was just too much time spent going off on several-page tangents of deep philosophical discussions about everything from religion, to war, to mysticism, to humanism, etc. And, two characters were specifically, and very obviously, created and given huge roles in the book for just this purpose. At first I liked Settembrini and his taking the fatherless main character, Hans, under his wing and trying to guide the young man in life's big questions. However, when they threw the character of Naptha in as his conversational nemesis, the philosophizing rapidly deteriorated for me. I glazed over many of their conversations. First of all, I'm not stupid so I don't need to be hit over the head so blatantly with their opposite viewpoints on every subject known to man. Second, their debates really took away from the story for me. Every time Hans and his friends visited these two, I knew that instead of fresh story to move along the plot, I was just going to get the same old arguments. Sadly, the arguments escalated into Naptha's irrational anger challenging Settembrini to a duel, ending in tragedy. I'm sure that this intellectual writing is a large reason that other authors and the Nobel committee consider this book such a masterpiece. I think the story itself could have stood on it's own, with a very reduced amount of lesson-learning philosophy thrown in for good measure.

The story itself is about 23 year old Hans Castorp, a young German man, in the years just prior to World War I, who has finished University with a degree in engineering. He is all set to begin an internship at a ship-building company. Before buckling down and starting work, he's off to take a 3-week visit with his cousin, Joachim, who has been in a sanatorium in the alps for several months trying to battle tuberculosis. Once there, Hans becomes accustomed to their way of life on the mountain and it begins to feel like home. He comes down with a cold right at the end of the three weeks and the doctor determines he may have had a weakness in his lung since childhood and suggests a several month stay. Hans stays for 7 years! Through those years he witnesses life and death, falls in love, educates himself on medical issues, learns about life from the aforementioned Settembrini and Naptha, and most of all, spends time with his cousin. Joachim, however, has only ever wanted to serve in the military and can't wait to leave and get back to normal life....so much so that he leaves prematurely (after 15 months) before he is well. Though he gets to serve in his beloved military for less than a year, he ends up back at the sanatorium and has a heart-breaking decline in health and eventual death. Hans, even though it becomes clear he's not really sick, won't leave the sanatorium even to attend Joachim's funeral back home. He's completely safe and happy in this little world he has come to know. Not until he's gone through many experiences does one event finally jolt him back into the need to go back and face reality...the outbreak of World War I. Though Hans could never understand Joachim's huge desire to be in the military and serve his country, it ironically ends up being Hans who goes to participate in the war. The last scene of the book shows Hans in an intense battle and leaves his eventual outcome in the war up in the air. That is a HUGE oversimplification of the plot, but that's the gist. I really did like both Hans and Joachim...but again...didn't LOVE them. I'm glad to have read the book, though, and been enriched just a little bit more by these two and their sanatorium "family".

A few writing snippets that I really liked. Throughout the book a big theme is time and how it is measured, not by the clock, but more spiritually. At the beginning of the book, when Hans sets off on his two-day journey to the sanatorium, I like how Mann describes the affects that space away from every day life has on a person. I knew and felt exactly what he meant....because I experience that exact feeling every two years when we arrive in the fresh mountain air of Oregon. It's a hard feeling to put into words, but he did it:

Two days of travel separate this young man (and young he is, with few firm roots in life) from his everyday world, especially from what he called his duties, interests, worries, and prospects--separate him far more than he had dreamed possible as he rode to the station in a hansom cab. Space, as it rolls and tumbles away between him and his native soil, proves to have powers normally ascribed only to time; from hour to hour, space brings about changes very like those time produces, yet surpassing them in certain ways. Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state--indeed, in but a moment it can turn a pedant and philistine into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.

Yes, that Oregon air makes me a vagabond. :-)

When Joachim has come back to the sanatorium, the doctor has told him that he should be good to return to the military by October. This is the goal that everyone keeps in their minds, but most of them know in their hearts he will not make that goal for leaving, if he ever gets to leave at all:

   The October deadline passed quietly. No one mentioned it--not the director and not the cousins to one another; they simply ignored it in silence with downcast eyes. To judge from what the X-ray plate showed and what Behrens dictated to his psychoanalytic aide-de-camp during Joachim's monthly checkup, it was only too clear that there could be no question of departure, unless it was fraudulent, because this time it was a matter of Joachim's remaining on duty up here with iron self-discipline, until he had been made fully weatherproof--only then could he fulfill his oath by service in the flatlands.
   This was the watchword, with which everyone pretended to be in silent agreement. The truth was, however, that no one was quite certain whether anyone else believed this watchword in the depths of his soul; and because of their doubts the cousins would turn their downcast eyes away--but only after their eyes had first met. 

Joachim's death from tuberculosis reminded me so much of my brother laying there in the hospital, completely ravaged by the medical atrocities of AIDS. Up until the day he died, he would never discuss the hopelessness. He always talked about the next new breakthrough that he hoped to try when he got out of the hospital.

For there could be no mistaking two obvious facts: first, Joachim was approaching death with his mind clear; and second, he did so contentedly and at peace with himself. Only in his last week, at the end of November, after the weakness in his heart had become noticeable, were there times when his mind would wander and he would suddenly grow confused about his condition and speak hopefully and happily of a speedy return to his regiment and of taking part in the grand maneuvers that he obviously thought were still under way. It was at this same period, however, that Director Behrens stopped holding out any hopes whatever and told the family it was only a question of hours.

And finally, when Hans tries to convince Settembrini that a duel is a huge, unnecessary mistake because of a mere disagreement about beliefs that led to an insult, Settembrini replies:

Whoever is unable to stand up for an ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of that ideal, and no matter how intellectual one may become, what matters is that one remains a man.

There are so many more really good passages, but they are so long! I do believe I will read Mann's Buddenbrooks as well. :-)