Harold Bloom once wrote of The Magic Mountain: “When I was a boy, first reading fiercely, some sixty years ago, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain was widely received as a work of modern fiction almost comparable to Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.”
That comparison recalls Nabokov’s irritation with Central European modernism. In an argument with Edmund Wilson, he asked, “How could you name that quack Mann in one breath with P. and J.?” Mann, to Nabokov, was one of those “puffed-up writers” trading in “great ideas”; risking, of course, the very criticism often levelled against Nabokov himself: all style, no substance.
Bloom’s instinct ran the other way. Not toward ideas but toward intimacy: “Why read? Because you can know, intimately, only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing.”
This is the claim that stays. In reading Mann, one is not only thinking through ideas but inhabiting someone; someone ordinary and oddly porous, open to every intellectual current that passes through the sanatorium. Castorp is known not because Mann explains him but because seven hundred pages of his attention have become, imperceptibly, one’s own.
>This took me back several decades. I first read The Magic Mountain because a friend said I would identify with one of the characters (an irresistible appeal!). So I read it and loved it, wondering all the time who I was supposed to identify with. I still don't know!
>Donald – That would be an intrigue too far for me. Given the wide range of characters in MM, from disreputable to honourable, I would press my friend for information.