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notasilkycat's review against another edition
4.5
It felt like I myself spent 7 years up there, in mountains. What a journey it was. Not easy and comfortable one but the most enlightening experience indeed.
outcolder's review against another edition
5.0
Everybody is dying, but some are dying faster than others. Way up the altitude in Davos, it’s a gang of bizarre bourgeoisie dying faster, through the eyes of the simple Hans Castorp, an orphan and no stranger to death. There is lots of intellectual riffing, about time, about progress, about humanism and about being human. There’s a lot of pre-antibiotics treatment of pulmonary infections, some of it quite gruesome. There’s an ill-fated love affair, there’s danger in the woods, there’s music, duels, seances, but most of all, there’s laughs. This mountain is funny.
booksvoices's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
5.0
savaging's review against another edition
5.0
I came to this book with my eyes already rolling. One of these high-brow tomes that people like to 'have read' more than they actually enjoy reading. 850+ small-print pages where nothing happens. Who convinced me to put this on my reading list?
And yet, and yet. After a month with this book I found myself in love.
Let me concede that all of these critiques are true:
-The 'plot' is completely limp. It feels more like some kind of Cannery Row format except with less interesting hijinks.
-There are way too many arguments between intellectual blowhards.
-In all its 854 pages, the book doesn't pass the Bechdel test.
But also this is true:
-I was so moved by this book.
-Even a century on, Mann remains a friendly and clear-eyed companion for readers.
-Hans Castorp, the protagonist, is weirdly lovable, despite it all. His confused ideas and general curiosity are far more compelling than anything the intellectuals around him espouse.
-It's a comedy! I laughed out loud!
-It's also endlessly eery. A good going-crazy-in-quarantine read.
-The ending made me shudder and almost weep, to feel this gentle narrative suddenly wrenched away into trench warfare.
Would I actively recommend this book to anyone? No - how could I? But if you're the sort of masochist who already enjoys reading The Classics, then just know that there really is something here for you.
And yet, and yet. After a month with this book I found myself in love.
Let me concede that all of these critiques are true:
-The 'plot' is completely limp. It feels more like some kind of Cannery Row format except with less interesting hijinks.
-There are way too many arguments between intellectual blowhards.
-In all its 854 pages, the book doesn't pass the Bechdel test.
But also this is true:
-I was so moved by this book.
-Even a century on, Mann remains a friendly and clear-eyed companion for readers.
-Hans Castorp, the protagonist, is weirdly lovable, despite it all. His confused ideas and general curiosity are far more compelling than anything the intellectuals around him espouse.
-It's a comedy! I laughed out loud!
-It's also endlessly eery. A good going-crazy-in-quarantine read.
-The ending made me shudder and almost weep, to feel this gentle narrative suddenly wrenched away into trench warfare.
Would I actively recommend this book to anyone? No - how could I? But if you're the sort of masochist who already enjoys reading The Classics, then just know that there really is something here for you.
gijshuppertz's review against another edition
4.0
De Toverberg (Der Zauberberg) van Thomas Mann. Een modernere roman uit 1924. Na het gelezen te hebben ben ik overweldigd van de kennis waarover Thomas Mann beschikte en zijn poëtische schrijfstijl. Het boek was soms lastiger om door te komen, maar de prachtige filosofische uiteenzettingen van de tijdgeest waarin hij leefde maakt het meer dan waard! Zoals Mann zelf benoemde zal ik om het boek echt te begrijpen, het nogmaals moeten lezen, maar voor nu laat ik het rusten en hoop ik jullie te kunnen informeren over het boek met de volgende twee video's (een algemeen review en een analyse van het hoofdstuk "Sneeuw")! Ik hoop dat het bevalt.
https://youtu.be/pVZJrgCWpc4
https://youtu.be/WIPKF2Sj_C0
https://youtu.be/pVZJrgCWpc4
https://youtu.be/WIPKF2Sj_C0
evetoi's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
desertmichelle's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
What can I possibly say? It's beautiful. I'd put this high up on my list of favorite classics.
zioale's review against another edition
3.0
Per quanto mi fossi armato di pazienza, passata la prima metà del libro l'ho trovato veramente lento.
novabird's review against another edition
5.0
As the result of a skewed syllogism about love, Mann ends this thought exercise with, “..out of silent regard for the bloody banquet,” and for me this is the key phrase that opens the text for me. The bloody banquet is the human condition and it is also a continued allusion to the maenad’s dismemberment and eating of a child, a very dark Dionysian dream.
"Now it is as if the Olympian magic mountain had opened before us and revealed its roots to us.” The Birth of Tragedy – Nietzsche. If Thomas Mann takes the title for his book from this line, then one need not wonder at his cool approach to death. Mann develops his ideas of the inherent ambiguity of humanity and masterfully unites it with Nietzsche’s concept of Apollonian/Dionysian contrast. (In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche contrasted Dionysus with the god Apollo as a symbol of the fundamental, unrestrained aesthetic principle of force, music, and intoxication versus the principle of form, beauty, and sight represented by the latter. Nietzsche also claimed that the oldest forms of Greek Tragedy were entirely based on suffering of Dionysus.) In fact, he does this too well, as the balance achieved is one of the best representations of ambiguity (and not an unreliable narrator at all) as a narrative technique that I have yet encountered. However this astonishing ability nullifies the overall story that also refuses to be defined because the ending cynically undermines and provides no real end-point.
This Birth of Tragedy effect is accomplished through the constant intoxication of the patients at Berghof Sanitorium as shown by their collective fevered state, which stands in for the Dionysian effect. At the same time, both the narrator and the setting provide the cooling effect of Apollonian rationality. These two opposites collide in many guises, in many polarities as presented within the text, yet most notably in the protracted debates between Septtembrini and Naphta, where reason and emotion verbally duel. Hans finally sees there is no reconciliation between their disparate viewpoints,
In the chapter, ‘Fullness of Harmony,’ page 636-7, Hans is described as having a dream in which he has the legs of a goat, as naïve and goat-footed and as a young faun, this is surely as much a depiction of a young Dionysus as it is of Pan. This to me is a key to understanding the motivation of the Apollonian/Dionysian tale that we find in the chapter Snow in which his hypothermia delusion sees an idyllic scene transfigure into a dark horror. While the philosophical insight that Hans experiences, that of,
In the end the bloody banquet becomes a, where Mann tells us the reader that the tale he has just told is a ‘hermetic,’ one about from which we can’t escape.
"Now it is as if the Olympian magic mountain had opened before us and revealed its roots to us.” The Birth of Tragedy – Nietzsche. If Thomas Mann takes the title for his book from this line, then one need not wonder at his cool approach to death. Mann develops his ideas of the inherent ambiguity of humanity and masterfully unites it with Nietzsche’s concept of Apollonian/Dionysian contrast. (In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche contrasted Dionysus with the god Apollo as a symbol of the fundamental, unrestrained aesthetic principle of force, music, and intoxication versus the principle of form, beauty, and sight represented by the latter. Nietzsche also claimed that the oldest forms of Greek Tragedy were entirely based on suffering of Dionysus.) In fact, he does this too well, as the balance achieved is one of the best representations of ambiguity (and not an unreliable narrator at all) as a narrative technique that I have yet encountered. However this astonishing ability nullifies the overall story that also refuses to be defined because the ending cynically undermines and provides no real end-point.
This Birth of Tragedy effect is accomplished through the constant intoxication of the patients at Berghof Sanitorium as shown by their collective fevered state, which stands in for the Dionysian effect. At the same time, both the narrator and the setting provide the cooling effect of Apollonian rationality. These two opposites collide in many guises, in many polarities as presented within the text, yet most notably in the protracted debates between Septtembrini and Naphta, where reason and emotion verbally duel. Hans finally sees there is no reconciliation between their disparate viewpoints,
“Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the "Critical-Subjective," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphtha's "morally chaotic All.”
In the chapter, ‘Fullness of Harmony,’ page 636-7, Hans is described as having a dream in which he has the legs of a goat, as naïve and goat-footed and as a young faun, this is surely as much a depiction of a young Dionysus as it is of Pan. This to me is a key to understanding the motivation of the Apollonian/Dionysian tale that we find in the chapter Snow in which his hypothermia delusion sees an idyllic scene transfigure into a dark horror. While the philosophical insight that Hans experiences, that of,
“Reason stands foolish before (death) him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. Lust, my dream says, not love. Death and love – there is no rhyming them, that is a preposterous rhyme, a false rhyme. Love stands opposed to death – it alone and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason yields kind thoughts. And form too, comes only from love and goodness: form and cultivated manners of man’s fair state, of a reasonable, genial community – out of silent regard for the bloody banquet.” 487
In the end the bloody banquet becomes a