The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann’s supreme achievement The Magic Mountain is a novel of astonishing philosophical complexity and formal brilliance. Its guileless hero, a “simple young fellow” named Hans Castorp, travels to a snowbound Swiss sanatorium to visit his cousin Joachim, a tuberculosis patient. His planned three-week stay stretches into a far longer sojourn among an eclectic cast of characters who spend their days dining, reclining, and flirting as Europe marches steadily toward World War I. A pair of pedagogically minded interlocutors, Lodovico Settembrini and his adversary, Leo Naphta, expose the protagonist to the era’s leading political, religious, and philosophical debates, while a mysterious fellow patient of culturally ambiguous origins provides instruction in the meaning of love.



Employing the self-imposed constraint of using only English words that mean now what they meant in Mann’s own era, award-winning and best-selling translator Susan Bernofsky gives us not only a biting, mordantly funny philosophical satire but also a charming tale of a naive young man’s coming of age. This is the version of The Magic Mountain that can justifiably claim, in Bernofsky’s own words, to be “the fairy-tale one”—a translation both for our time and timeless.