The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann’s supreme achievement, The Magic Mountain is a novel of astonishing philosophical complexity and formal brilliance. Sometimes forgotten is that it is also, at its heart, an emotionally resonant fairy-tale. Its guileless hero, a “simple young fellow” named Hans Castorp, travels to a snowbound Swiss sanatorium where an eclectic cast of characters spends their days dining, reclining and debating ideas as Europe marches steadily toward the Second World War. Employing a remarkable self-imposed constraint of using only English words that mean now what they meant in Mann’s era, award-winning and best-selling translator Susan Bernofsky gives us not only a biting, mordantly funny philosophical satire but also a charming tale of one man’s coming-of-age. This is the version of The Magic Mountain that can justifiably claim, in Bernofsky’s own words, to be “the fairy-tale one”–a translation that is simultaneously for our time and timeless.