Thoughts?

Mann is great. It's a comfy novel, reminds me of The Castle by Kafka, but much more erudite.

All the characters are pretty clear representations of different aspects of German society at the time Mann was writing it, but still fully-fleshed out.

Make sure to read Death in Venice first.

>>7660746
Its excellent. Intriguing games with pace & time. At points it felt like it was slipping into dullness, but then Mann hits you with another incredible powerful & evocative section. I actually read Mann because I was interested in his influence on Mishima, which this more than illuminated.

GOAT. Mann is a god tier author.

>>7660746
Okay. Mann is occasionally-mention-him-in-conversation tier. Nothing impressive.

>>7660996
Embarrassing.

>>7660996
shameful

>>7660996
>being this pleb on my /lit/

baka desu senpai

>>7660996
>OP's book is considered to be the most influential 20th century German book
>Doctor Faustus is also on this list
>deserves nothing more than a passing mention
Wew

>>7660746
Have always wondered why this is never in any of those top 100, lit-core etc. lists.

William Gass - A Temple of Texts

Lifetimes don’t last long enough for us to have more than two or three vocational revelations. Perhaps I was fifteen when I first read “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” but I still remember part of my emotion. I desperately wanted to be “like Mann.” It was not just that I wanted to write as powerfully or as profoundly, or even that I wanted to have his art or his mind. I remember trying to understand my desire for that likeness, and it was only later that I decided what my feeling really was: I wanted to be like that story—to have that measured depth, that subtlety, that sense—yes—of its own importance, and even to be its problems, endure its theme. And later I would devour everything he wrote, especially Death in Venice. Dr. Faustus is an equally admirable novel, I think; but The Magic Mountain is a work I have read more often than any other novel, and one I studied carefully when young, and began to see as a complex textual world. I loved the fact that I could read its brief passages of schoolboy French. At St. Louis’s yearly Book Fair (the region’s most important cultural event), I found a few years back a nice copy of Joseph in Egypt. On the flyleaf, in Mann’s hand, was a thank-you note to his St. Louis hostess. The book cost me a buck.

>>7662782
cause /lit/ doesnt read friend