In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community devoted exclusively to sickness-as a microcosm for urope, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. he agic ountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.
