My Summer Book Report of Rank, Stinking Defeat
The Magic Mountain, written by German author Thomas Mann in 1924, is one of those books that always lands on the “greatest books” lists, so as I have been trying to broaden my grounding in the classics, I checked it out of the library and had a go. It’s a hefty tome at 706 pages (at least in this translation), but that didn’t scare me; I read pretty quickly—about a page a minute—so that only meant fewer than twelve hours of actual reading. Feeling cocky, I didn’t even get to it for the first two weeks of the three-week checkout period because I was finishing up other things.
Sometimes I read the author forewords (yes, I’m that person), and Mann’s foreword was very witty and engaging. I looked forward to diving right in, so I did. Unfortunately, I dove back out repeatedly. It was all too easy to keep putting this book down, and I can sum up the reason in one word: digression. Before I explain that, let me just set up the story a little: Mann’s novel concerns the experience of a young German man named Hans Castorp, who takes a three-week holiday to visit his cousin Joachim, who is staying as a patient in a sanitorium in Switzerland. (Heh—okay, my Spell Check doesn’t like ‘sanitorium’ and wants me to write ‘sanitarium’. Tough nuts, Spell Check. That’s what they were called.) Aaaaaanyway, almost immediately upon arrival, Hans himself begins to suffer mysteriously from an assortment of physical infirmities, even as he holds himself apart as simply a vacationer among the real patients, whom he observes with a critical, bemused eye.
Mann is, as I mentioned, a witty writer, and he is an excellent hand at character development. The protagonist, from whose perspective we experience the story, is fully-fleshed (the third-person narrative allows us to share Hans’s viewpoint while allowing the author to freely make asides about his character to us) and the supporting characters are colorful and intriguing. But then there’s the digression: frequently, the action of the story is interrupted as we take a trip into Hans’s mind, either witnessing as he internally toys with some idea or theory of his, or as he experiences a memory from his childhood. These are not off-putting at all, as they serve to add dimension to his character and explanation for his actions and motivations, but they are an easy point at which to exit the novel for a while (after all, we do all have lives, I think).
So, it can be slow going. And I started running out of time and renewing the book repeatedly. After all, I had to read it; it was on my list! Alas, I finally had to give up completely, and what did me in was, in one different word: bloviation. Now there’s a word you don’t hear often (my Spell Check just threw up its little electronic hands and stalked out of the room), so I will provide a definition as I understand it: when some long-winded cuss yammers on just to hear himself talk, or a person with a pedantic streak lectures at great length about some lofty concept using pretentious and obscure terminology, that’s bloviation. Mann has a character, Settembrini, who is continually guilty of the former, and I cringed inwardly whenever he made an appearance on the page—I was only about a hundred pages in when, in the middle of another one of Settembrini’s rants, I wondered why the author found it necessary to subject me to this person and whether I could handle much more.
But the final straw came about 20 pages later, in the form of the other type of bloviation, when I was treated to the actual text of the florid and baffling lecture given by the sanitorium’s psychiatrist, Dr. Krokowski. This was the point at which I experienced not mild irritation, but true despair. The author himself was the perpetrator of all this! Was I to expect the next five hundred pages to be miraculously free of any further fits of lengthy punditry? I was not. So I admitted defeat, which was especially bitter because after I snapped the book closed in disgust, I noticed the words “Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature” winking mockingly up at me from the cover. But frankly, I ain’t gettin’ any younger, and there are plenty of other books out there.
But what of Hans Castorp? Is he being made sick on purpose? Much mention was made of people who didn’t expect to stay long ending up there for years and even dying. Also, the money-hungry nature of the industry was vilified at length (by—you-guessed it—Settembrini). Was that foreshadowing as to Hans’s fate? Why is the book called The Magic Mountain? Do things get exceptionally weird and trippy? Despite all the circumlocution, the story itself had enormously creepy potential. So, I did something I have never, ever done before, as I consider it cheating and spoiling: I turned to the end to see what happened.
And of course I will not spoil the book for you, gentle reader, because you may have a higher tolerance for bloviation. I should think you do, if you have reached the end of this article. Cheers!
Other books I disliked, but at least read:
https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2022/04/review-of-man-who-mistook-his-wife-for.html
https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2022/05/a-review-of-boston-darkens-by-michael.html
Other books I read and liked:
https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2025/12/book-review-ja-konraths-murder-mystery.html
https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2023/08/review-of-king-in-tree-by-steven.html
https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2022/05/review-of-your-head-is-houseboat-by.html
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