First, thanks to my co-host Paul, who gave me The Magic Mountain for Christmas . . . a couple of years ago. One of his all-time favorites, it’s been “next” on my TBR, for a bit. I was intimidated, but it was welcoming from the start. This is a novel dense with ideas, arguments, and digressions, and yet, in John E. Woods’s wonderful translation, it is a pleasure to read, never stuffy; in fact, often hilarious and heart breaking.

The book follows Hans Castorp, “a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man,” when he travels to the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium. What is meant to be a brief stay stretches into years, and Hans becomes absorbed into the peculiar rhythms of life on the mountain, a place suspended from ordinary time. He is drawn into debates about reason and faith, progress and tradition, life and death, while the world below moves toward catastrophe.

The novel contains multitudes, but for me (perhaps because I was also reading Proust) what stood out was the exploration of time. On the mountain, days stretch and contract, weeks lose their edges, and years slip by almost without notice. Mann is fascinated by how easily we adapt to this distortion. And The Magic Mountain doesn’t just describe altered time, it recreates it for the reader, explicitly asking us to slow down, to linger, to experience differently.

I also loved when Mann would step out of the conversations and describe the gorgeous, dangerous setting as it affects one’s very thoughts:

Around ten o’clock the sun would appear like a wisp of softly illumined vapor above its mountain, a pale spook spreading a faint shimmer of reality over the vague, indiscernible landscape. But it all melted into a ghostly delicate pallor, with no definite lines, nothing the eye could follow with certainty. The contours of the peaks merged, were lost in fog and mist. Expanses of snow suffused with soft light rose in layers, one behind another, leading your gaze into insubstantiality. And what was probably a weakly illumined cloud clung to a cliff, motionless, like an elongated tatter of smoke.

It was a happy, welcome coincidence that I finished this within a few days of finishing In Search of Lost Time. Both novels are deeply concerned with time, intellect, love, illness, and the shadow of war, and both ask what it means to live attentively within a human life shaped by forces larger than oneself. Yet to me they felt quite different in temperament and method; where Proust turns inward, toward memory and consciousness, Mann widens outward toward debate, history, and collective fate.

Like Proust, though, Mann began this work before World War I, which interrupted his work, and so it was finished after such a cataclysmic event shook everything and changed the trajectory of the work. One of the central characters argues that such a thing was necessary: “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego. What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is — terror.”

And, also like the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain closes with an emotional and poetic force that is deeply earned. Without offering easy resolution, the book gathers years of thought, delay, and debate into something sudden, fragile, and deeply human. It left me moved, unsettled.