Der Zauberberg
1924
- fiction
- sanatoriums
- german fiction
- translations into english
- philosophy
- civilization
- special hospitals
- fictional works
- tuberculosis
- continental european fiction (fictional works by one author)
The story
One of the most influential and celebrated German works of the 20th century has been newly rendered in English by Woods, twice winner of the PEN Translation Prize. First published in 1929, Mann's novel tells the story of Hans Castorp, a modern everyman who spends seven years in an Alpine sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, finally leaving to become a soldier in World War I. Isolated from the concerns of the everyday world, he is exposed to the wide range of ideas that shaped a world on the verge of explosion. Considering what was to follow, the most poignant moment comes when Naphta, a Jewish-born Jesuit, defends the use of terror and the taking of life for the sake of an all-encompassing idea. Woods's work reads more naturally than the original translation, which, while faithful to the German, was stiff and forbidding. A necessary addition to any fiction collection.
What it’s like
Long, looping sentences that circle a single idea until it opens into several, with a dry, ironic narrator who never quite lets you settle. The sensory world is cool and thin: snow-light on balconies, the smell of carbolic and pine, the hush of a high-altitude sanatorium where days are measured by temperature charts, meals, and rest-cure hours. The mood is wintry, ruminative, and faintly absurd, a slow-burning sickroom melancholy with long stretches of talk in the dining hall and on walks through the snow. The pace is deliberate to the point of stillness, and most of the drama lives in conversation and interior reflection rather than action. Illness and death appear quietly and matter-of-factly; the violence is in argument, with ideas about terror and sacrifice debated at length rather than enacted on the page. Nothing here is gory or frightening in a conventional way, but the intellectual weight is heavy and the book asks for patience. It suits a long winter stretch, an unhurried reading week, or a reader who enjoys sitting with ideas as much as with characters, especially those drawn to European modernist fiction and the slow unfolding of a mind.
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