Hans Castorp on the verge of an intense flirtation with Clavdia Chauchat a married woman and feverish fellow patient is perched high above the world dozing in his splendid lounge chair at the International Sanatorium Berghof swaddled in blankets against the Alpine chill. To his surprise and secret delight he will remain on this magic mountain for seven years removed from the real world but irresistibly drawn into the sanatoriums own complex vertiginous society which in Manns hands becomes a microcosm for Western civilization and its interior life on the eve of the First World War. Flooded with feeling with powerful evocations of disease with the glories of the natural world and inklings of the supernatural The Magic Mountain is equally remarkable for Manns treatment of time the flatland time of healthy active people and the inelastic present of the people up here for whom illness is a lifelong career. Mann is a master at drawing dazzling characters with the finest irony Settembrini the impassioned Italian liberal and Naphta the caustic Jewish Jesuit whose opposing worldviews trap them in a grotesque duel Mynheer Peeperkorn the enormously wealthy Dutch planter whose garrulous personality all but overwhelms his fellow patients the blustery Director Behrens and subtle Dr. Krokowski whose combined energies rule the day and the night of the Berghof Clavdia Chauchat the elusive Russian beauty whose slinking charms can awaken forgotten love and of course Hans Castorp himself the ordinary made extraordinary whose interior journey leads him out into a blinding snowstorm and a stunning fleeting moment of revelation Hans who is last seen on a battlefield of the Great War the very conflict toward which every word of the novel has been magnetized. show more