The Magic Mountain
  • Published: 1 October 1996
  • ISBN: 9780749386429
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 752
  • RRP: $22.99

The Magic Mountain

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Oct 1996
EBook
3 May 2018
Hardback
15 Jun 2005
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Find local retailers Find local retailers Abbeys Angus & Robertson Boomerang Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Your Bookstore

This European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner explores the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of World War I

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers

This European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner explores the lure and degeneration of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of the First World War.

Hans Castorp is 'a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man' when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. What should have been a three week trip turns into a seven year stay. Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War.

'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian

'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator
  • Published: 1 October 1996
  • ISBN: 9780749386429
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 752
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing.

He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. IN 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany for Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States, where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the US was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

Also by Thomas Mann

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
Confessions Of Felix Krull
Lotte In Weimar
Joseph and His Brothers
Collected Stories (Mann)
Little Herr Friedmann And Other Stories
Death In Venice
See all

Praise for The Magic Mountain

Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. A novel for a lifetime not just a rainy afternoon

Guardian

The greatest German novelist of the 20th century

Spectator

A life-altering book would be The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It's really thick and German. I like its sensibility, which is unashamedly intellectual.

Rufus Wainwright, Observer

Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse.

Independent

A monumental writer

Sunday Telegraph

Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love

Jonathan Coe, Guardian

A masterwork, unlike any other... a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing

A. S. Byatt

Comparisons arise with The Waste Land, published two years earlier and also concerned to exhibit the futility of a way of life which had led to the horrors of the First World War. But while T. S. Eliot's poem is a pared-down epic of resonances and allusions, Mann's novel is a full-blown exploration, playing seemingly endless variations on the theme

Sunday Telegraph

The most life-changing novel

Stylist