Recommendations from our site
“Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain introduces us to Eros and Thanatos, the twin forces of life and death, and they become the subject of profound meditations and conversation. There’s more than a whiff of spookiness to the work, a fascination with disease, suffering, and death. Mann described his novel as a Zeitroman, a novel that takes time as its subject matter but also captures an entire era.” Read more...
Maria Tatar, Literary Scholar
“The protagonist of the book, Hans Castorp, visits his cousin in a clinic in Switzerland, in the Alps, because he has a cough and tuberculosis. The first day the protagonist is at the clinic he sees everything anew, and that takes a certain amount of pages in the book. Then the next week he experiences takes the same amount of pages in the book as the first day did. Then the first month and the next month takes about the same amount of pages as the first week had, and so on. And later the first year takes the same amount of pages as the first day had. So because he stays there in the ever-repeating sameness of being in the Magic Mountain Resort, time totally accelerates because he loses all novelty” Read more...
The best books on Time and the Mind
Marc Wittmann, Psychologist
