The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) is a social comedy with tragic overtones, providing a portrait of Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. The novel recounts how an apparently simple North German engineer, Hans Castorp, comes to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, intending to visit his sick cousin, and ends up staying for seven years. He matures intellectually and emotionally, encountering love and death amid a cast of vivid characters who are portrayed with Dickensian humour and sophisticated irony, until he is jerked out of his torpor by the outbreak of the First World War.

This translation is accompanied by an accessible introduction by Ritchie Robertson, and detailed notes explaining the many cultural and historical references in the text.