Oh boy. After reading Herman Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ I thought
that some more ideas minded German literature would do me some good and so I
picked up Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’. Great, I thought, the mountain as a metaphor for
intellectual study and reflection, right up my street. But I had bitten off more than I could
chew. It’s tough. It requires first rate concentration
and iron stamina to get through and so far I’ve still a long way to go.
I was about half-way through before I had to put it down. It was too much. The dense complexity of literature has,
I think, reached it’s zenith with this book. It is one of the hardest books I’ve ever had to read and I’m
not even done with it yet.
This is a promise that I will read it and give it a fair outing in Part
Two of this post and who knows maybe it might get better. In any way I need a mental rest before
contemplating picking it up again.
The story is about Hans Castorp who visits his friend in a santorium
before becoming ill himself and having to spend the next seven years
there. Hans is an engineer and a
young man who has yet to experience the world and in the santorium he
experience’s the philosophy of Herr Settembrini and Frau Chauchat.
It is confusing and generous in it’s expounding humanism and in a
certain sense sensually pleasing.
The concept I love but it is beyond me and as sincere in its searching
intellect I am unable to follow it.
So why continue reading it?
I do want to be able to say I read one of the most difficult books in
literature and also I do want to see if it gets a bit easier to digest.
This, I believe, is different to what he usually wrote so I will have to
read more of him in order to put him into a suitable context.
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