Condition remarks:Book: Very goodJacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good conditionPages: GoodSet against the rarefied air of a Swiss Alpine sanatorium in the years preceding the First World War, The Magic Mountain draws young Hans Castorp into a world suspended between life and death, where a planned three-week visit stretches into seven transformative years. Thomas Mann's monumental 1924 novel — translated here with masterful fidelity by H. T. Lowe-Porter — chronicles Castorp's intellectual and spiritual awakening as he encounters a cast of vivid, ideologically charged characters: humanists, Jesuits, and nihilists all locked in a battle for the soul of a naïve young German engineer. Widely regarded as one of the towering achievements of 20th-century European literature, The Magic Mountain is a novel of ideas in the grandest tradition, weaving themes of time, disease, political decay, and the decline of Western civilization into a narrative of breathtaking scope and ambition. Mann's prose — richly ironic, deeply philosophical, and suffused with a melancholic beauty — transforms a mountain retreat into a microcosm of a civilization on the brink of catastrophe. This illustrated Franklin Library edition, with artwork by Gonzalo Fonseca, presents one of literature's great masterworks in a form as enduring as the novel itself; once Castorp ascends that mountain, the reader may find it equally impossible to leave.
