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The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

Downloads: 153
First published: 1924
Pages: 744

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About this book

Thomas Mann's expansive novel follows the unremarkable young engineer Hans Castorp, who travels to a Swiss mountain sanatorium to visit his consumptive cousin for three weeks and ends up staying seven years. Cut off from the flatland world below, he falls under the spell of illness, the strange elasticity of time, and an alluring fellow patient, while two rival intellectuals, the liberal humanist Settembrini and the radical Jesuit Naphta, battle for his allegiance in long, brilliant arguments. Written over more than a decade and set on the eve of the First World War, the book is at once a coming-of-age story and a searching meditation on European thought, sickness, and mortality. It stands as Mann's most ambitious achievement. A free PDF and EPUB edition is available here.

About the author

Thomas Mann

Mann finished Buddenbrooks at twenty-five, a chronicle of four generations of a Lubeck merchant family modelled closely enough on his own that the city took offence, and the Nobel committee cited it above everything else when it gave him the prize in 1929.