They are preoccupied with their own gossip, flirtations, and novelties. The sanatorium is a weird, self-absorbed world, with strange patients from all over Europe. The central figure is more anti-hero than hero: Hans Castorp is a young man from Hamburg who visits for three weeks, but stays for seven years. The whole novel is set in a Swiss sanatorium, in the years leading up to 1914. You feel that Mann is forcing his readers to work out meanings, and find their own motivation to keep reading. It’s over 700 pages long, and not a lot happens. However, The Magic Mountain is not an easy read. You may know him through the beautiful film of his novel, Death in Venice. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and is one of Germany’s greatest twentieth-century writers. Thomas Mann is an author who deserves to be taken seriously.
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