The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
This was one of those books that felt like it had the whole world inside it. I still go back and forth between feeling like it was OK and like I really liked it. At the least, it made an impression on me. There were times when it dragged, which may have been part of Mann’s intent in his project to portray the passage of time. But there were also extremely powerful sections–in particular, I was very moved by the section called “Snow”. Although I was reading it in translation (obviously), I think it’s still fair for me to say that I don’t think Mann is a particularly good prose stylist, which is definitely a precondition for me to consider a book one of my very favorites. I do think that I will keep reading his work, and I’m pretty interested in his retelling of the Faust story. I imagine I will also want to read TMM again (as Mann suggests) at some point. But not for a while.