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The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 1924
Reviews

From: Jerome
Category: Books
Date: 23 December 2003

Review

This is a great book even though I don't know exactly what it means. It makes you want to spend 7 years eating 5 full meals a day, sleeping in the afternoond wrapped in a rug on a balcony, in a Sanatorium in the Swiss alps.

Like many long brilliant difficult tedious books ( by Proust, Musil, et al) it stretches your mind with its digressions and pages of high falutin dialogue. Afterwards, when you close the beaten up novel with a sigh and a tear ( another friend made, but now a memory) you are stronger to think new thoughts, and to make new connections between submerged memories and ideas and the world.

It is heaven or hell up their on the mountain, or a waiiting room or a laboratory, where wars, first and second, and genocide, and all this mess, is brought to the surface, or not, perhaps it is a palce where the body is sloughed off and the mind left to dream of love and infinity and all that dross.

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