The Magic Mountain (2 Volumes)

The Magic Mountain is the magnum opus of Thomas Mann, the German author and 1929 Nobel Laureate in Literature, first published in 1924. This edition presents Yang Wuneng's complete translation in two volumes. Hans Castorp, a young engineer from a wealthy Hamburg family, plans to visit his ailing cousin Joachim at the International Sanatorium Berghof in Davos, high in the Swiss Alps, intending to stay three weeks before returning home. Instead, he is diagnosed with a lung condition and remains at the sanatorium for seven years. The institution brings together patients from across Europe—Prussian officers, Russian ladies, Dutch colonials, Jesuits, Freemasons—whose personalities and ideas meet and clash. Running through the novel is the debate between the Italian humanist Settembrini and the Jewish Jesuit Naphta, touching on reason and faith, progress and reaction, health and illness, life and death. Hans's attraction to the Russian woman Clavdia Chauchat repeatedly unsettles the balance between his emotions and his intellect. Time on the mountain flows in strange ways, while the world outside changes dramatically on the eve of the First World War. His cousin dies, his friends scatter, and finally the roar of artillery awakens Hans from the magic mountain. Using a sanatorium as a microcosm, the novel depicts the spiritual crisis and collapse of values of an era, and is widely recognized as one of the most important German novels of the twentieth century.