pstrongemThe Magic Mountainem is simply one of the greatest novels ever written. - emThe Guardianem strongppWith this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. emThe Magic Mountainem takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an ordinary young man who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.ppMann was a master of this genre, in private life as in his fiction. - emThe London Review of BooksemppIn Mann's work the historic and contemporary retains its outsideness. He is a Wagnerian spellbinder, a mythmaker, but the myth always refers back to the real world. - emThe New York Re