The Magic Mountain - 2 Volumes by Thomas Mann. New York. 1927. Knopf. Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. 900 pages. hardcover.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
The book that established Thomas Mann's place in the front ranks of the world's great novelists - ultimately leading to his 1929 Nobel Prize for literature. Hans Castorp - on the verge of an intense flirtation with Clavdia Chauchat, a married woman and feverish fellow patient - is perched high above the world, dozing in his splendid lounge chair at the International Sanatorium Berghof, swaddled in blankets against the Alpine chill. To his surprise and secret delight, he will remain on this ‘magic mountain' for seven years - removed from the ‘real' world, but irresistibly drawn into the sanatorium's own complex, vertiginous society, which in Mann's hands becomes a microcosm for Western civilization and its interior life on the eve of the First World War. Generally regarded as Mann's magnum opus, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN enthralls by its portrayal of men and women in crisis, confronting illness and death, striving to find a sense of self and purpose - and by its brilliance as a manifold metaphor for our century's wider struggle with the burden of freedom, the ennui of civilization, and the seduction of totalitarianism. Flooded with feeling, with powerful evocations of disease, with the glories of the natural world and inklings of the supernatural, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN is equally remarkable for Mann's treatment of time - the ‘flatland time' of healthy, active people, and the ‘inelastic present' of the ‘people up here', for whom illness is a lifelong career. Mann is a master at drawing dazzling characters with the finest irony: Settembrini, the impassioned Italian liberal, and Naphta, the caustic Jewish Jesuit, whose opposing worldviews trap them in a grotesque duel; Mynheer Peeperkorn, the enormously wealthy Dutch planter whose garrulous ‘ personality' all but overwhelms his fellow patients; the blustery Director Behrens and the subtle Dr. Krokowski, whose combined energies rule the day and the night of the Berghof; Clavdia Chauchat, the elusive Russian beauty whose slinking charms can awaken forgotten love; and, of course, Hans Castorp himself - the ordinary made extraordinary - whose interior journey leads him out into a blinding snowstorm and a stunning, fleeting moment of revelation; Hans, who is last seen on a battlefield of the Great War - the very conflict toward which every word of the novel has been magnetized. One of the magnificent literary creations of our time. THOMAS MANN was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.
ALSO AVAILABLE IN A NEWER TRANSLTION BY JOHN E. WOOD -
New York. 1995. September 1995. Knopf. 0679441832. Translated from the German by John E. Woods. 707 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Martin Ogolter. Back-of-jacket photograph of Thomas Mann taken by Alfred A. Knopf on Mann's eightieth birthday, June 6, 1955; Photography Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
The book that established Thomas Mann's place in the front ranks of the world's great novelists - ultimately leading to his 1929 Nobel Prize for literature - is now presented in a new translation by John E. Woods, whose 1993 rendering of BUDDENBROOKS was widely acclaimed. Hans Castorp - on the verge of an intense flirtation with Clavdia Chauchat, a married woman and feverish fellow patient - is perched high above the world, dozing in his splendid lounge chair at the International Sanatorium Berghof, swaddled in blankets against the Alpine chill. To his surprise and secret delight, he will remain on this ‘magic mountain' for seven years - removed from the ‘real' world, but irresistibly drawn into the sanatorium's own complex, vertiginous society, which in Mann's hands becomes a microcosm for Western civilization and its interior life on the eve of the First World War. Generally regarded as Mann's magnum opus, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN enthralls by its portrayal of men and women in crisis, confronting illness and death, striving to find a sense of self and purpose - and by its brilliance as a manifold metaphor for our century's wider struggle with the burden of freedom, the ennui of civilization, and the seduction of totalitarianism. And in Wood's invigoratingly fresh translation we also see something less apparent to a previous generation of readers: how deeply Eros - obsessive desire, forbidden love - courses through every vein of Mann's story. Flooded with feeling, with powerful evocations of disease, with the glories of the natural world and inklings of the supernatural, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN is equally remarkable for Mann's treatment of time - the ‘flatland time' of healthy, active people, and the ‘inelastic present' of the ‘people up here', for whom illness is a lifelong career. Mann is a master at drawing dazzling characters with the finest irony: Settembrini, the impassioned Italian liberal, and Naphta, the caustic Jewish Jesuit, whose opposing worldviews trap them in a grotesque duel; Mynheer Peeperkorn, the enormously wealthy Dutch planter whose garrulous ‘ personality' all but overwhelms his fellow patients; the blustery Director Behrens and the subtle Dr. Krokowski, whose combined energies rule the day and the night of the Berghof; Clavdia Chauchat, the elusive Russian beauty whose slinking charms can awaken forgotten love; and, of course, Hans Castorp himself - the ordinary made extraordinary - whose interior journey leads him out into a blinding snowstorm and a stunning, fleeting moment of revelation; Hans, who is last seen on a battlefield of the Great War - the very conflict toward which every word of the novel has been magnetized. In Woods's new translation, the protean work - a vast, intricate tapestry of dramatic, emotional, and intellectual forces - reemerges, nearly seventy years after its original publication in English, as one of the magnificent literary creations of our time.
JOHN E. WOODS is the distinguished translator of many books - mostly notably Arno Schmidt's EVENING EDGED IN GOLD, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize In 1981; Patrick Suskind's PERFUME, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Mr. Suskind's THE PIGEON and MR. SUMMER'S STORY; Dorris Dorrie's LOVE, PAIN, AND THW WHOLE DAMN THING and WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?; Libuse Monikova's THE FAÇADE; and most recently, Thomas Mann's BUDDENBROOKS. Mr. Woods lives in San Diego. .
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 - 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family, and portrayed his own family in the novel Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, whence he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.