![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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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