Time to climb “The Magic Mountain”
Thomas Mann’s saga of high-altitude sickness is oddly uplifting
WHEN HANS CASTORP makes a midsummer visit to Davos, where his tubercular cousin, Joachim, is being treated, he expects to be there for three weeks. A job at a shipbuilding firm awaits Hans, the unassuming son of a merchant family from Hamburg. But he develops a fever, and ends up staying in the Swiss Alps for seven years. In the mountains, time moves elastically—days lengthen and years hurry past—as it can in a lockdown.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Climbing “The Magic Mountain””
From the June 20th 2020 edition
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