On The Magic Mountain

Years ago I read, with puzzlement, that Vladimir Nabokov had referred to Thomas Mann as a "fraud." In college, many years before that , I had read Death in Venice and Tonio Kroger and liked them both. Now, however, I have just finished The Magic Mountain, which I found both "lang" and "langweilich," ponderous, pretentious, repetitive, turgid, pointless, and exquisitely boring. I can see what Nabokov was getting at. I am not new to difficult literature, and I bristle when someone says that Proust is boring or that Joyce is, and, as someone trained never to give up on a book, especially one so well and long admired as this mountain, I suffered through it, in the Woods translation, to the bitter end, reading every incoherent spiel of every pretentious loudmouth, all only too similar to their creator. Had any of these babblers been more capable of coherent expression, I'm sure I would have liked them even less. Sure, I liked the beginning, the journey up to the mountain, and Hans's wandering on skis was well wrought. I think these episodes were the kernel of something Mann might have nurtured into a good book, had he not fallen into an almost endless metaphysical brawl in the snow.