The entanglement of everything
December 3, 2024 1:34 AM   Subscribe

While critics have typically described it as a novel of ideas, Mann first offered it to his readers as a fairy tale, albeit a modern, melancholic, ironic one. Its plot is a quest, a search undertaken by our hero, Hans Castorp, who desires to abandon the world of work, of exams and apprenticeships that leave him pale and trembling, for a utopia of eating, smoking, arguing, and having love affairs. Hans Castorp may strike us as a naïf, but among the fastidious German middle class, this confers upon him a paradoxical nobility; he is a modern knight errant, a young man at leisure to seek his paradise on earth. from The Apostle of Love by Merve Emre [The Yale Review]
posted by chavenet (7 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
if criticism is to serve as an X-ray, [o]ur X-ray should be read dialectically

cdr [g]
posted by HearHere at 5:43 AM on December 3, 2024 [1 favorite]


I would not claim that I have any profound or notable thoughts about The Magic Mountain, but I have read it. This essay seems to me to give a fair idea of how to read it - it's awfully big, you know, and I think that it can easily seem pretty overwhelming, especially once Hans is established in the sanatorium permanently and the plot is pretty much "being in the sanatorium".

If you haven't read it, it's definitely worth having a bash - the first third goes quite quickly and is full of description that will interest you in itself even if you're not necessarily gripped by Mann's style or themes.

It made me terrifically anxious, partly because it made me think about money all the time - how are all these people just sitting around doing nothing, how is Hans paying for this, if he weren't going to die in WWI how would his future be impacted by a youth of loafing, etc. I don't think Mann especially means me to think about this.

I am not a Mann enthusiast. After many years of worrying about being too bourgeois - preference for order and stability, not into death-haunted things unless they're the sort of "vampires but not too scary" things I like, relieved rather than sad that the big passionate romantic feelings of youth appear to be behind me, etc - I have decided, in our recent era of resurgent fascism, that actually preference for stability and dislike of trauma/excitement are good, and the goal should be to create order, stability and trauma-free living without just externalizing the costs onto other peoples and places. So anyway, I liked reading The Magic Mountain and you may like it too, but it did not so much refresh as depress the spirit, and I have come to be okay with that.
posted by Frowner at 7:39 AM on December 3, 2024 [11 favorites]


Long ago, 1992, I had to read TMM for a senior seminar with a professor I really wanted a grad school recommendation from. YMMV but it was pretty much the highest ratio of horrible garbage to Status as Great Literature that I've ever had to experience. Just awful dreck: this guy's in a sanitarium for tuberculosis and there's like half a dozen characters who just keep popping in and out and having these pseudo-philosophical "discussions", no actual story at all. Like I seriously had to keep poking myself with a pencil to make me read another page.

In class, the discussion was not flowing, so the professor points at me and says "Mr. Hobnail, you're unusually quiet: tell me about your experience reading the book", and I was super sleep deprived because I was putting myself through school with two jobs, and lost my filter and went on like a five-minute rant about all the things I hated about it. Maybe 3/4 of the way through this, the little Jiminy Cricket voice in my head was like "you're fucking up grad school, here", but I was in full form and had to finish.

He was so cool about it: he was like "you can absolutely hate a book, even if it's famous and has won awards. Just that you absorbed enough of it to hate it with such eloquence tells me you really meshed with it. Good work." And not only did he write me a recommendation, but I've used that thought ever after. I taught Gibson's The Peripheral a couple of years ago, and had a student pitch an absolute fit about it: "why won't he just tell me what the fuck is going ON?" and I just channeled that guy from 30 years before and was like just let the hate flow, Isabel. You're doing great.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:49 AM on December 3, 2024 [17 favorites]


My favorite Thomas Mann novel remains Buddenbrooks, although it is anxiety-inducing due to the slow slide and collapse of the family business and respectability throughout the book. The Magic Mountain is a very dense novel and I have just picked it up again for the first time since college, to see if I get more out of it than I did then. How odd that it is set in Davos, which is famous nowadays for very different reasons.
posted by fortitude25 at 8:20 AM on December 3, 2024 [3 favorites]


metafilter: "the goal should be to create order, stability and trauma-free living without just externalizing the costs onto other peoples and places"

Nice one, frowner.
posted by kaymac at 9:28 AM on December 3, 2024 [4 favorites]


Like outgrown_hobnail, I read Zauberberg for a senior seminar on "The Modern Novel" in the early 1990s, where we were given choices from a list of "encyclopedic novels" to read for our final projects. My mom was a librarian with degrees in comparative literature and German, while my tastes then were primarily science fiction and horror, and part of my choice was wanting to connect more with her about reading. I'd enjoyed the vaguely doom-haunted sense of Death in Venice when I borrowed it from her bookshelf. I enjoyed Zauberberg, despite the fact that the professor told me he wished I'd chosen something less canonical and more challenging—his including it on the list, he'd said, was a nod to "old-school" modernism. Other choices on the list included Gravity's Rainbow, DeLillo's underrated Ratner's Star, Ulysses, The Golden Notebook, Foucault's Pendulum, The Recognitions, and I can't remember which John Barth book.

As with Moby Dick, I was too young to really appreciate it at the time. I later picked up both Gravity's Rainbow (and became a Pynchon fan) and Foucault's Pendulum and liked them both better than Zauberberg, and then DFW blew my mind with Infinite Jest. In retrospect, I like the professor's question: to what degree does the novel you've chosen succeed or fail in encylopedically representing its world? If I'd paid more attention to that question, and imagined the novel as an opportunity to immerse myself in a deeply fleshed-out representation of a time, place, and spirit, I think I would have enjoyed it more. Like Frowner, I feel like the novel asks one to engage some pretty complex feelings, and I think it succeeds at doing so—and I like Emre's approach to reading the novel. It'll make you think, if you're willing.
posted by vitia at 12:08 PM on December 4, 2024 [1 favorite]


If I'd paid more attention to that question, and imagined the novel as an opportunity to immerse myself in a deeply fleshed-out representation of a time, place, and spirit, I think I would have enjoyed it more

I think that learning to read with rather than against was probably the big reading-skills achievement of my adulthood. It's true that a certain amount of "reading against" is a necessary part of becoming a separate person in your teens/early twenties, but I feel like the reading culture of my college and post-college years was very much "read everything with the maximum lack of sympathy and lack of interest in the author's project except for those books that are currently trendy, which should be read with total reverence". Reading with suspicion, talking about books from a defensive crouch, feeling vaguely that if you liked a book that wasn't on the trendy list it was because you were reading it wrong, etc. And more, feeling that your job when reading was to totally destroy the writer and the book - total negativity, this sucks, this hitherto acclaimed writer sucks, etc. Like Tolstoy trying to take down Shakespeare, and just as with Shakespeare, most of the books are still standing after their "total destruction" at the hands of my little comp lit crew.

In a way, I think that pushes people into a lazy poptimism - if reading the "great books" and enjoying them or trying to understand them rather than viewing them as bourgeois rot, no fun, uncool, etc is bad, then at least you can read the lightest of junk fiction and just say that you're reading it for fun, for its kitsch value, etc, and you won't feel bad about it because after all it's not like you're claiming that it's any good.

In retrospect, I feel lucky that I grew up as a frosty little snob pushing myself as a reader, because then when I got back to the difficult books, I still had the reading fluency to tackle them.

I do a lot of book group stuff where we read snob books of various kinds. I would not say that I have a lot of profound things to say about them, but I do feel that I'm a stronger reader than I was five or ten years ago. I often find myself noticing how sentences are constructed (for good or for ill!), noticing how a book is paced, noticing various literary devices and generally reading with more perception than was my wont. When I was only reading easy books that were exactly to my taste, I mostly was not growing as a reader. I did gain some historical knowledge - I would say that I have a pretty good grip on science fiction by women from the seventies through the nineties, for instance, and I can talk about how fandom and SFnal culture shaped it. And reading masses and masses of Victorian through Edwardian ghost stories has been informative in a lot of ways. It's certainly worthwhile to know more about how a genre develops, its themes and concerns, its publishing history, etc.

I mean, I still read plenty of easy books that are exactly to my taste! I've buzzed through five or six vampire novels in the last two weeks, for instance. But I feel like my part of the culture (which, granted, is not for instance NYC literary culture) has erred a little bit too much on the poptimism side of reading - I know a lot of people who read a lot but very few who read "difficult" fiction of any kind.

Anyway. I have never been able to get into Ratner's Star even though a lot of people talk it up. I suppose if I suggested it to the book group I'd have to read it for very shame.
posted by Frowner at 12:27 PM on December 4, 2024 [1 favorite]


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