Synopses & Reviews
In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps — a community devoted exclusively to sickness — as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.
Review
"[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing." — from the new Introduction by A. S. Byatt
Review
"[Woods's translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann's] ironically elegant prose." — Washington Post Book World
Review
“All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’s version...Woods captures perfectly the irony and humor.” — New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1924 The Magic Mountain was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus (first published in the United States in 1948). Thomas Mann died in 1955.