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This European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner explores the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of World War I

About the Author

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is regarded by many as the greatest German novelist of the 20th century. Mann's first major novel, Buddenbrooks, sold over a million copies in Germany alone, before Hitler banned and burned it. Mann fled Germany and spent the latter part of his life living in Switzerland and America. He wrote many essays as well as novels, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

Reviews

Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love
*Guardian*

Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. A novel for a lifetime not just a rainy afternoon
*Guardian*

A monumental writer
*Sunday Telegraph*

The greatest German novelist of the 20th century
*Spectator*

Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse.
*Independent*

A life-altering book would be The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It's really thick and German. I like its sensibility, which is unashamedly intellectual.
*Observer*

A masterwork, unlike any other... a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing

Comparisons arise with The Waste Land, published two years earlier and also concerned to exhibit the futility of a way of life which had led to the horrors of the First World War. But while T. S. Eliot's poem is a pared-down epic of resonances and allusions, Mann's novel is a full-blown exploration, playing seemingly endless variations on the theme
*Sunday Telegraph*

The most life-changing novel
*Stylist*

Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love -- Jonathan Coe * Guardian *
Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. A novel for a lifetime not just a rainy afternoon * Guardian *
A monumental writer * Sunday Telegraph *
The greatest German novelist of the 20th century * Spectator *
Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse. * Independent *