Young engineer Hans Castorp arrives at a Swiss Alpine sanatorium to visit his tubercular cousin Joachim, is himself diagnosed with a touch of the disease, and stays for seven years, drawn into a timeless world of illness, desire for the enigmatic Clavdia Chauchat, and prolonged ideological combat between the humanist Settembrini and the totalitarian ex-Jesuit Naphta, ending with Naphta's suicide and Castorp's departure into the First World War.
Books mentioned in The Magic Mountain (4)
Ocean Steamships by Ridgely Hunt: “On the seat beside him lay a paperbound book entitled Ocean Steamships, which he had perused from time to time earlier on his trip”
Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller: “Have you ever seen a production of Don Carlos—the way things were done at the Spanish court? When King Philip enters, all in black...”
Christian Mysticism by Joseph von Görres: “And Naphta named Arndt, who had cursed industrialism and exalted the nobility, named Görres, who had written a Christian Mysticism.”
Sacred Hymns by Alessandro Manzoni: “heard that old enemy of the Church taunting and inveighing against the Christian sensitivities of the Romantics. Against Manzoni's Sacred Hymns.”
Books that mention The Magic Mountain (11)
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami: “Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, I told her. ... Then I picked up The Magic Mountain again, reading and sipping brandy and waiting to get sleepy.”
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño: “unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Misérables or War and Peace.”
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: “Thomas Mann's description in The Magic Mountain of the effect on Hermann Castorp of his wife's death”
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine: “Does that explain The Magic Mountain?”
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom: “Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain was widely received as a work of modern fiction almost comparable to Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's In Search of Lost Time.”
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie: “The Magic Mountain, Madame Bovary, Don Quixote.”
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell: “I obey, then find my place in The Magic Mountain.”
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse by Faith Sullivan: “She thought of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, set in a tuberculosis sanatorium.”
On Literature by Umberto Eco: “critics saw an allusion to its Naphta-Settembrini dialogues in The Name of the Rose”
The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth: “She made the round of the galleries and museums in the morning, then after lunch came to the hospital and read to him for two hours from The Magic Mountain”
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk: “The great literary novels—such as Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, and The Waves”