What is The Magic Mountain about?

Hans Castorp, a young Hamburg engineer, goes to a Swiss alpine sanatorium in 1907 to visit his ailing cousin for three weeks. He ends up staying seven years. That is both the plot of The Magic Mountain and its central joke: the mountain is a trap, a place outside time, where Europe's educated class debates, flirts, plays cards, and slowly dies — insulated from the world below that is drifting toward catastrophe.

Mann is writing a novel of ideas in the fullest sense. The mountain's two great intellectual presences — the rationalist humanist Settembrini and the reactionary Jesuit Naphta — argue with each other throughout the novel, using Hans as the audience for a seven-hundred-page seminar on European civilization. Settembrini represents Enlightenment progress, democracy, and reason; Naphta represents Catholic mysticism, death-worship, and the seduction of pure will. Hans, affable and intellectually passive, absorbs both without becoming either. He is a portrait of the bourgeois European who watched the pre-war debates without choosing sides — and who then went to war when the argument became irrelevant.

The prose is extraordinarily dense and Mann's treatment of time is the novel's most discussed formal achievement: the first weeks at the sanatorium are rendered in exhaustive detail while later years compress to near-nothing, enacting the way time dissolves in an institution outside ordinary life. The sanatorium is both a literal tuberculosis clinic and a metaphor for Europe between the Franco-Prussian War and 1914 — a civilization that knew something was wrong but could not bring itself to leave the mountain.

This is an extremely long and demanding novel. Readers who love intellectual fiction — Musil, Proust, the late James — will find it absorbing. Readers who want forward momentum will struggle. The reward is one of the most thorough portraits of a civilization preparing, without knowing it, for its own destruction.