Shabbat Reading: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain

#whatireadovershabbat Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (trans. John E. Woods)

I didn’t read The Magic Mountain in one Shabbat. Yes, the book is long. More than that, it asks you to luxuriate in its telling, which sometimes devotes the same number of pages to a single day as to several years. Mann’s epic novel, you see, is about time. Set in a Swiss sanatorium on the eve of WWI, the story follows one patient, Hans Castorp, during his stay there. Countless things happen to him (he loves, loses, and learns, to start), but above all he experiences the equivocal wonder of time’s passage. The Magic Mountain is a novel of ideas, a meditation on human nature and the cataclysm of modernity. And like any great story, it is one to lose yourself in—for however long it takes to read.