![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Set in a tuberculosis sanatorium during the years immediately prior to the Great War, this book is many things: a modernist classic, a traditional bildungsroman, a comedy of manners, an allegory of pre-war bourgeois Europe, and – perhaps most importantly this time of year – the ideal book to keep you company on the long winter nights, when whichever flu bug is doing the rounds has gained the upper hand and forced you into a sneezing retreat to your sickbed.įor The Magic Mountain is a work of sick-lit par excellence: a novel that convincingly portrays illness as a state of mind as well as of body (though Mann does not shy away from the more visceral aspects of the latter). Buddenbrooks may be the precociously brilliant debut, Death in Venice the small-but-perfectly-formed novella, but for me, Mann's real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic of 1924, The Magic Mountain. ![]()
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