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| The Magic Mountain (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas Mann
Creator: John E. Woods
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
Buy New: £9.09
You Save: £3.90 (30%)
New (13) from £7.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 63639
Media: Hardcover
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 854
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 1857152891
EAN: 9781857152890
ASIN: 1857152891
Publication Date: April 29, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Like Everest, some people just have to climb it October 22, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have wanted to read this book for a long time, and decided to take the plunge on discovering this new translation by John E Woods. This is a monster of a book - at 854 closely typeset pages, it is going to take a long time to read - in my case, the best part of a month. My opinion on finishing is that if you like this sort of thing its tremendously rewarding, but even still its going to be a difficult read at times, and you will find that some of the dense philosophical dialogue will need to be skim-read if you are not going to get bogged down.
There are many think I liked about it:
- A unique setting and situation - the patients at a Swiss Sanatorium in the 77 years preceding World War 1;
- The closed world Mann creates with its obsessions and rivalries, its artificial manners and routines. This is a unique fictitious society, but one that is entirely credible in view of the situation its inhabitants find themselves in;
- The way it so perfectly captures the state of mind of the patients, their adaptation to their illness and the way they have found a community that accepts them as they are;
- The creation of a timeless world where months merge into one another and years pass without notice;
- The way the sanatorium is a microcosm of Europe in the early part of the 20th century, with all the national conflicts in the wider world being played out in this intense community of tuberculosis sufferers.
- The perfect descriptions of obsessive states of mind that can be developed in such situations, imaginary love affairs, supernatural occurrences, intense antagonisms on the one hand and alliances on the other.
On the downside, the characters in the novel are incredibly verbose. When they speak, they go on for pages, and you have to picture the other people in the conversations standing politely waiting for the speaker to finish before they launch off into their own equally dense replies. However, this is all part of Mann's creation of "timelessness", and if you want to read this book in a hurry you're going to miss the point.
The translation is modern and natural and while I do not read German, I suspect that the spirit of the author comes through the pages.
I am pleased to have read this and feel quite a sense of achievement. My only regret is that I felt the ending is a bit hurried (remarkable for this book!), and is not entirely satisfactory. However, undoubtedly a pillar of 20th century literature, this book should not be missed - if you have the time to read it.
 Amazing but v. long. May 25, 2006
15 out of 22 found this review helpful
I confess I've not finished it, but for the first half I was spellbound. It seems to go off a bit when one of the characters starts givingvery long speeches, so it turns into a different kind of book. If you don't believe that a story about a TB sanitorium can be gripping - you're wrong.
But let me address one very strange thing about my copy, which raises an interesting point about translations. I read the English translation (from original German) but there's an absolutely key passage of the book in which the language switches to French for about six pages, and was left untranslated. Fortunately I can (just about) get by in French, but if one has an English translation, wouldn't it be best to translate all non-English passages, with some note as to the language they are in? Otherwise it's a bit of a swizz.
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