Sontag’s memory of her meeting with Mann seems to have become its own micro-genre: a report of an acute case of intellectual imposter syndrome inflicted by an encounter with Mann’s writing. Sontag and a friend of hers managed to get themselves invited to pay a visit at his house-that was the meeting she described in the quote above.
She soon found out that Mann, exiled from Nazi Germany, was living very close to her, in Pacific Palisades, a secluded coastal neighborhood in Los Angeles.
Here is how Susan Sontag put it, reminiscing about her first encounter with Thomas Mann: “Everything that surrounds my meeting with him has the color of shame.” Sontag read The Magic Mountain as a teenager in the 1940s and was captivated, but also intimidated. I should know, since I have spent the past few years studying other readers who have experienced it. The novel in question is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Gooderham in The Guardian.Reader, I have a problem: I seem to be stuck on a novel that makes me feel bad about myself. And an essential purchase for every sick-bed this winter.” – excerpt from a critique by the great and erudite W.B. A book I return to every couple of years, The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written. The entire work is suffused with sly and gentle humour, making it an absolute delight to read. Indeed, Hans positively revels in his status as one of the “horizontal”.If this all sounds a little grim, it is worth reiterating that The Magic Mountain is essentially a comic novel – albeit a comic novel dealing with the darkest of subjects. There is a chilling ambiguity as to just how much of Hans’s illness is genuine and how much the result of “going native”. What was intended as a stay of a few weeks stretches into.
For The Magic Mountain is a work of sick-lit par excellence: a novel that convincingly portrays illness as a state of mind as well as of body here, illness is decidedly centre stage, and the plot – what there is of it – almost incidental: Hans Castorp, a naive young engineer, travels to the International Sanatorium Berghof high up in the Swiss Alps to visit his ailing cousin. The ideal book to keep you company on the long winter nights, when whichever flu bug is doing the rounds has gained the upper hand and forced you into a sneezing retreat to your sickbed. Set in a tuberculosis sanatorium during the years immediately prior to the Great War, this book is many things: a modernist classic, a traditional bildungsroman, a comedy of manners, an allegory of pre-war bourgeois Europe, and – perhaps most importantly. “.Mann’s real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic. All pages are in fine condition with the normal light browning to the page edges, the volume is exceedingly tight and the spine perfectly square.
0 kommentar(er)
