Hans Castorp - on the verge of an intense flirtation with Clavdia
Chauchat, a married woman and feverish fellow patient - is perched high
above the world, dozing in his splendid lounge chair at the
International Sanatorium Berghof, swaddled in blankets against the
Alpine chill. To his surprise and secret delight, he will remain on this
"magic mountain" for seven years - removed from the "real" world, but
irresistibly drawn into the sanatorium's own complex, vertiginous
society, which in Mann's hands becomes a microcosm for Western
civilization and its interior life on the eve of the First World War.
Flooded with feeling, with powerful evocations of disease, with the
glories of the natural world and inklings of the supernatural, The Magic
Mountain is equally remarkable for Mann's treatment of time - the
"flatland time" of healthy, active people and the "inelastic present" of
the "people up here, " for whom illness is a lifelong career. Mann is a
master at drawing dazzling characters with the finest irony:
Settembrini, the impassioned Italian liberal, and Naphta, the caustic
Jewish Jesuit, whose opposing worldviews trap them in a grotesque duel;
Mynheer Peeperkorn, the enormously wealthy Dutch planter whose garrulous
"personality" all but overwhelms his fellow patients; the blustery
Director Behrens and subtle Dr. Krokowski, whose combined energies rule
the day and the night of the Berghof; Clavdia Chauchat, the elusive
Russian beauty whose slinking charms can awaken forgotten love; and, of
course, Hans Castorp himself - the ordinary made extraordinary - whose
interior journey leads him out into a blinding snowstorm and a stunning,
fleeting moment of revelation; Hans, who is last seen on a battlefield
of the Great War - the very conflict toward which every word of the
novel has been magnetized.
