The Magic Mountain Essay

I was quite new to the world of novels and the fascinating world that lived inside them when I picked up the book The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. I was initially into poetry (due to Harold Bloom), I had read easy to read history books and comic books when I was young but never “serious literature”. When I was amazed by the poetry of W.B Yeats and Percy Shelley thanks to the recommendation of Harold Bloom in his book How to read and why, I also found his recommendation of the book The Magic Mountain. Written in the genre of the Bildungsroman (a book focused on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood), the novel is set before the World War one where the protagonist, Hans Castorp who is an engineer visits his sick cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is seeking a cure in a sanatorium in Davos, high up in the Swiss Alps. There they meet the unforgettable Lodovico Settembrini who teaches Castorp in the ways of philosophy, history, medicine, politics etc, as well as having debates with a Jewish Jesuit Leo Naphta, Castorp finds love in the mysterious Madame Clawdia Chauchat. This is a novel of ideas but me it also a novel of experience, in particular of experiencing the strangeness of the world we live in. Coming from the merchant city of Hamburg, Castorp is shocked by the different culture of the sanatorium and the way time is felt there. A single day feels like a week, this is skewed and subjective perception of time is also reflected in the narrative of the novel accelerates, so that the first five chapters relate only the first of Castorp’s seven years at the sanatorium in great detail; the remaining six years are described in the last two chapters. This element of the novel changed the way I looked at time, how subjective it can be which alters our expectations of everyday life, getting older it feels as though time accelerates. The patients at the sanatorium suffer some form of tuberculosis, which rules their daily routines such as having rest cues occur frequently throughout the day and scheduled lunch and dinner times. The reader the feels as Castorp feels, competently taken into this strange world yet alienated by its way of life. There are patients that threaten to kill themselves, there is a "Half lung club" due to the conditions of the patients and people trying to summon spirits of their decreased relatives. Shock and awe are the only the words that can be expressed, that even after 7 years at the sanatorium, Castorp and the reader still feel the strangeness of the world of the Magic Mountain. That no matter how much time you spend in a particular place or culture the peculiarity and irrationality of human behaviour means you can never fully understand the people and culture of any place.