The Magic Mountain. Part 1

“The Magic Mountain” is a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Its residents are forced to stay here for years, communicating with the outside world only through rare letters and telegrams. Here, time flows unnoticed; life and death lose meaning; and, by contrast, the smallest nuances of human relationships acquire painful sharpness and significance. For the sanatorium’s inhabitants, love, friendship, enmity, and jealousy seem marked by the shadow of nonbeing… This story has many possible readings—a powerful philosophical study of life’s foundations, a subtle psychological analysis of different types of human character, relationships, immersion in the history of culture and religion, and in history itself—Mann depicts society on the eve of World War I.