The Magic Mountain

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.