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With this sizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. In The Magic Mountain, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - a community devoted exclusively to sickness - as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. To this hermetic yet intrique-ridden world comes Hans Castorp, a 'perfectly ordinary' young man who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying seven years. For on the Magic Mountain, Hans will succumb both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. Newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John Woods, The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.
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