THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (1924) by Thomas Mann

"Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates."
— from THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (1924) by Thomas Mann

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the 

Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. READ more here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/the-magic-mountain-by…/

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
―from THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (1924) by Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann

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.