Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain with Steve Dowden and John Burt

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[@yodydee]

I'll be curious of this one... just finished the "sequel" of The Magic Mountain, namely the new novel of Olga Tokarczuk. Good stuff but not reaching (is it possible...) the heights of her Books of Jacob. I read TMM many years ago and loved it... although the best Thomas Mann in my opinion is Doktor Faustus.

[@theemptyatom]

What book of hers are you considering a "sequel" to Mann's Magic Mountain? I just looked her up - I guess you mean The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story? Is it any good?

[@yodydee]

@@theemptyatom . Hi, yes, that book. All in all, I didn’t fully enjoy it, cannot exactly tell why… It was a bit like “conceptual art”, very meaningful and smart but not really enjoyable. But others might love it. Her The Books of Jacob (900 pages) was one of my fave reads of the past few years.

[@theemptyatom]

@@yodydee thanks for the reply

[@ericadler9680]

One of the worst books by a bad writer (only Doktor Faustus is worse). Cardboard, ridiculous characters and far too much description. There is no life in the novel, no intensity, no real characterisation. Mann remained in the 19th Century his whole life, but he never reached the level of good novelists of the 19th Century like Flaubert or Balzac. As a novelist, he is an embarrassment, and one of the most over-rated writers in history. (Mann's own son Golo thought Zauberberg was the least accomplished of all of Mann's novels.) Mann's strength did not lie in his fiction, but in his essay writing.

[@GreenTeaViewer]

hot take you have there. I disagree needless to say, but I can see that a certain temperament which enjoys Flaubert or Balzac might not enjoy Mann. I perceive agonised intensity in Zauberberg, Mann is doing a post-mortem on the entire 19th century and in particular the German civilisational project which reached an impasse and then committed suicide.

[@ericadler9680]

@@GreenTeaViewer What about the cardboard characters and all the flat, sterile over-description? I've met several people who disliked Mann's novels, and there are reasons for that.

[@GreenTeaViewer]

@@ericadler9680 Confession time, I haven't read Zauberberg for 20 years and it's a but fuzzy at this point. I do remember that I found it absolutely unputdownable and I inhaled it in about 4 days. So there's a counterpoint to your people who don't like Mann and think the writing is sterile. The characters are largely cyphers used to explore ideas, this is basically explicit and on the surface. You've given us the clue to your antipathy to Mann with your citation of Flaubert and Balzac. Great writers btw. But nothing to do with Mann's approach to the novel. If French realism is what turns you on, you may have to use a different lens to read Mann.

[@ericadler9680]

@@GreenTeaViewer I haven't read it in nearly 30 years but I remember I strongly disliked it for exactly these reasons. My approach to novels is that for a novel to be good, the characters have to have a deep characterisation. Everything else takes second place, whether it's satire or philosophical speculation or comedy or whatever, because an novel is primarily about the characters, their problems and their struggles. I take the same approach to films by the way. This approach may be somewhat limiting, I admit. But if what you're interested in is satire or philosophy or comedy or something like that, there are other media for that, where the focus is on such things. Not that novels cannot contain them, it's just that it shouldn't be the primary focus. If you take this approach, Mann is not a good novel writer, not like the aforementioned ones and not like Dostoevsky, Proust, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Conrad, Stendhal, Kafka and others. He simply wasn't able to make his characters come alive. This is especially noticeable in Doktor Faustus, where both main characters, the narrator and the composer, remain very bland and superficial throughout (and where Mann has far too much unnecessary and flat description of what different rooms contain etc).