Where to start with Thomas Mann
The catalog gives us only the long Alpine sanatorium novel — read it slowly, and read it against its reputation.
You have heard The Magic Mountain is one of the great German novels of ideas, you have looked at the seven hundred pages and the discussions of time and disease and metaphysics and put it back down, and you want a way in that does not require giving up your weekends.
Trying to read Magic Mountain in two weeks like a normal novel, drowning in the philosophy, and concluding Mann is unreadable. Or treating the long debates as the point and missing the comic, almost erotic stillness of the sanatorium itself, which is where the novel actually lives.
The reading path
- Death In Venice (coming soon) — Mann's most-translated short work — a hundred-page novella where every theme of the long novels lives in miniature. The door into his prose without the encyclopedia of Magic Mountain.
- The Magic Mountain — Take six months. Read in the rhythm of the sanatorium itself. Hans Castorp is supposed to be unimpressive; the novel's patience with him is the point. Read the snow chapter slowly; it is the spine of the whole book.
Why this order
Mann is the great novelist of European ideas, but his books only work when they are given the time their characters are given — the philosophy is the form of the patience, not a layer to be extracted from it.
Held back, and why
- Buddenbrooks — Mann's early family-saga novel, the most accessible of the major novels. Not in this catalog yet; it would be the natural second door.
- Doctor Faustus — The late novel about a German composer who makes a Faustian bargain. Save it; it rewards a reader who already trusts Mann's patience.