The Magic Mountain

'Hans Castorp filled his lungs with the pure mountain air--this fresh, light atmosphere that was so easy to inhale and held no scent of moisture, no content, no memories...'

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) is a social comedy with tragic overtones, providing a portrait of Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. The novel recounts how an apparently simple North German engineer, Hans Castorp, comes to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, intending to visit his sick cousin, and ends up staying for seven years. He matures intellectually and emotionally, encountering love and death amid a cast of vivid characters who are portrayed with Dickensian humour and sophisticated irony, until he is jerked out of his torpor by the outbreak of the First World War.

This translation is accompanied by an accessible introduction by Ritchie Robertson, and detailed notes explaining the many cultural and historical references in the text.

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Thomas Mann

Simon Pare studied modern languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He became a literary translator in 2006. He now lives near Zurich and has translated over 30 works of literature and non-fiction from German and French. His translation of Christoph Ransmayr's The Flying Mountain made the Man Booker International 2018 longlist, and he was runner-up for the 2021 Schlegel-Tieck Prize.

Ritchie Robertson retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford. He is now an Emeritus Fellow of the Queen's College. His many books include Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985), The Enlightenment: The Pursiuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (2020) and German Political Tragedy: The Machiavellian Plot and the Necessary Crime (2024), as well as books on Kafka and Goethe in OUP's Very Short Introductions series. Since 2004, he has been a Fellow of the British Academy.