And it was only when I was deep in China, in a bus headed to the mountains of Guilin, that I opened my copy of Mann and resignedly began to read. Part of me suspected that I would regret the choice, which may have been why I also packed James Clavell’s Noble House-one of the great trashy popular novels-as a backup choice. (This wasn’t the first time I’d employed this trick: I’d read Gravity’s Rainbow in Rome and most of Proust in Finland using the same method, and it had always worked pretty well.) Still, I slid The Magic Mountain into my bag less with anticipation than out of a sense of obligation, and with a distinct sense that I was taking my medicine. Finally, last month, I took my copy along with me to China, reasoning that I’d be more likely to finish it if it were the only book I had in my native language in a foreign country.

Woods translation at the Printer’s Row Lit Fest earlier this year.

It may be true, as Mann says in the introduction, that only the exhaustive is truly interesting, but most of us are probably inclined to take him at his word.Īnd yet The Magic Mountain has always been on my short list of books to read, especially after I picked up the acclaimed John E. And there’s no denying that the plot of The Magic Mountain-a young engineer, Hans Castorp, visits a sanitarium in the Alps for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years-doesn’t quite promise nonstop delights, especially when spread across more than seven hundred pages. The smooth surface of Mann’s prose offers fewer enticements to the casual browser: while a glance at the pages of Ulysses suggests a wealth of unexplored treasures, Mann presents only an unbroken succession of dense paragraphs. Part of this is due to the fact that Mann’s reputation, or his snob chic, has suffered in comparison to Joyce and Proust, at least for the purposes of cocktail party conversation. It’s safe to say that out of all the acknowledged masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is the least inviting.

The magic mountain pages