This was VERY long, but it had such profound insights into the culture and the condition of Europe at the time of its writing.
The writing is excellent. It is not for everyone, by the way. It could be called a "slog"!
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s sly, satirical novel of illness and civilization in the years before World War I, is supremely readable; more than any other modern novel of its caliber, it’s a book you can take to bed with you, for its slow unwinding of individual destinies within a communal setting evokes something akin to the feelings you might have watching the most high-minded miniseries ever filmed. Which is not to say it isn’t profound, and funny, too, filled with human foibles of every kind and replete with sexual as well as intellectual passions. All told, its unprecedented fusion of realism and symbolism appeals to the heart as much as the brain. Set almost entirely at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, where well-to-do patients from across Europe are recovering from tuberculosis, The Magic Mountain tells the story of Hans Castorp, a young man from Hamburg, who arrives to pay a short visit to his ailing cousin Joachim. Seven years later, he’s still there breathing the mountain air, unable to return to the world below. The disease of Castorp and his fellow patients is Europe’s illness, Mann implies, and, for all its liveliness of character and incident, the novel is an elegy for a culture that the author inferred was approaching its demise
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