By this point, my enquirer’s eyes were wide with interest and I was astounded. Here is what happened yesterday: I finished this book and tossed it forcefully onto the coffee table next to me in what may be seen as a transparent attempt to attract attention to myself (which is something I tend to do often) and sure enough someone picked it up, read its title, and asked me what it was about, providing me with a wonderful opportunity to roll my eyes dramatically (another move with which I am somewhat familiar) and ask, “Do you realllllly want to know?” I explained that it was about this aimless young gentleman who decides to kill some time before starting a new job by visiting his cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium high up in the Swiss Alps, but who begins to exhibit symptoms of ill health himself and whose visit becomes lengthened by increasing bouts of time until his initial 3-week stay has been stretched out to a full seven years, and that this book was about his experiences in that sanatorium over the course of those seven years.

Which should be readily apparent, because if I were not, this book would probably have received only two stars from me-not as a reflection of its literary quality per se, but rather as a reflection of my own reaction to it. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland.

His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate in 1929, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

La montaña mágica by Thomas Mann