The Magic Mountain

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. <i>The Magic Mountain </i>takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp an ordinary young man who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.