enkiiii 's review for:

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

2.0

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Read this if you enjoy monumental concepts such as death and time being discussed in a trivial, dispassionate manner of a wikipedia contributor. 

Aside from TB poor Hans Castorp has a psychosomatic disorder called Being German, which prevents him from partaking in the pleasures of the flesh. In the solitude imposed upon him by frequent rest cures, he discovers he can distract himself from his fleshly desires with intellectual masturbation. The repressed eroticism erupts in unlikely places: men sucking on cigars, a beating heart seen with an X-ray machine, borrowing pencils, blunt objects prodding cavities where blunt objects don’t belong (pleural), life itself giving Hans a wet kiss. The author unfortunately shares Hans Castorp’s affliction. He’s too ashamed of the body to really commit to writing about death, illness and eroticism. And the philosophy of it is pretty stale. Even if I could disregard the way the philosophical digressions are hamfisted into the narrative I couldn’t find much value in them. The only thing that’s carried me through past page 400 was the fact that I’ve already read X amount of pages and it’d be a shame to quit now. 

And Hans’s personal development arc ended how? With him leaving all his questions about life by the wayside and going to war, making his first act as he rejoins the world an abdication of agency. Ok. So not a thing has changed during those 7 years? Idk if I’m missing something but to me the Magic Mountain has been nothing but a big temporal sinkhole. So I guess in that respect it has fulfilled its artistic vision.