The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann

<p><strong>"<em>The Magic Mountain</em> is simply one of the greatest novels ever written." - <em>The Guardian</em> </strong></p><p>With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. <em>The Magic Mountain</em> takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.</p><p>"Mann was a master of this genre, in private life as in his fiction." - <em>The London Review of Books</em></p><p>"In Mann's work the historic and contemporary retains its outsideness. He is a Wagnerian spellbinder, a mythmaker, but the myth always refers back to the real world." - <em>The New York Review of Books</em></p><p>"Mann's sense of vulnerability modifies his temptation to abstraction; his awareness of the tawdry and shameful humanizes his concentration on the very act of art. He is saved by the perverse, by the knowledge that comes from having looked at the lost. For this his greatness, threatened by its own energy, still inspires awe and love." - <em>The New York Times</em></p><p>"<em>The Magic Mountain</em> taught me that big i