Nearly 700 close-spaced printed pages and minimizing the page margins, make the house of Hans Castorp a place where it is reassuring to venture for a player who is not accustomed to the great Russian novels or , reading the title of the novel whose protagonist is Hans ( The Magic Mountain), has been confused with the more controversial recent novels and serials, based on vampires and unsolved mysteries, with isolated villages and imposing castles from thin foundation literature. Moreover, the Corbaccio, which has the merit of having revived the readers a new edition of the powerful novel by Thomas Mann in 2011 in the series "The great writers, "he chose for the cover photo of a grim Alan Powdrill that hints at an eerie lake surrounded by a girdle of mountains, flattened by heavy clouds that are about to capture the only living being who has ventured into those places: a gull, which is easy to imagine a horrible fate. So the possibility of confusion to readers of vampire love is high.
Here, however, the fascination of death, of which Thomas Mann is a very skilled performer (think "Death in Venice") melts and mixes with a dry humor that the author has defined a very long short story that is " triumph a drunken mess of a life dedicated to the highest order . Hans Castorp comes from this order. When he arrives at the sanatorium, which will become the unchanging backdrop for his initiation to disorder , is drunk with solid and respectable consistency.
Then with an impalpable time stream will pass through the illness, love, passion, rationalism and the irrational pessimism, but in none of these transits will find the meaning of his research. Why is Hans Castorp explorer of souls and this will point to the waiting, the stillness as pick for the discovery.
Only when the might have found it, realizing that " there are two roads that lead to life: one is the usual, direct, honest. The other is bad, leads through death and is brilliant ", will start to enjoy his discovery, which led him to disappear into the belly of the war.
Thomas Mann, in his speech at Princeton University, asked its readers to read The Magic Mountain at least twice in order to discover all that lay just beneath the surface of its large short story. It is not an easy. Many test themselves with this book and many drop out. " Too many issues, too many thoughts, too many descriptions, too little action, too much self-analysis, too ambitious, too much and just ."
These are the most common comments that I recorded on the book by those who abandoned him. All fairly understandable. We will not say that this is a constituent of the books of European literature of the twentieth century, nor I will tell you that you have to have a book, read, breathe, as many critics and writers have repeatedly reminded us.
's probably true. But what took me several times to take, leave, start over, throw out of bed this book was a single question: Who was really Hans Castorp?
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