The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is a long, hypnotic read about a European sanatorium in the early years of the 20th century. It follows an unremarkable protagonist named Hans Castorp who visits his cousin in the alpine hospital, and then is committed himself. He stays on for many years. The strange cast of characters, from all over Europe, are maybe an allegory for pre-war socio-politics. I don't know. It's a bizarre novel, unconcerned with plot and instead indulging in theme over hundreds of pages. In that respect, it anticipates my boy Karl Ove Knausgaard.
One major theme is humanity's inability to reckon with time. A narrative burst wonders "What is time? A secret--insubstantial and insignificant. A prerequisite of the external world . . . How does our makeshift assumption of eternity and infinity square with concepts like distance, motion, change, or even the existence of a finite body in space?" It goes on like that for a while. Castorp himself gets sucked into the eternal routines of the sanatorium. We are reminded that "when one day is like every other, then all days are like one . . . Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep." This was my experience reading The Magic Mountain. It was a weird portal into eternity. (Depending on the translation, it's about 100,000 words longer than The Grapes of Wrath, and it feels like it.) This wasn't unpleasant--I liked the book and it often put me to sleep. But it took me almost three months to finish.
The thing is, I was reading this ponderous book as an appetizer. Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium--a newer release that is described as an "homage" and a "rejoinder" to The Magic Mountain--looks intriguing. Because I wanted to know what all that was about, I picked up Mann's book and fell into the time-trap vortex. But no matter. I'll soon read Tokarczuk's much smaller novel see how it compares, really see how these Nobel-Prize winning writers talk to each other, across a gulf of a hundred years.
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