The Magic Mountain is a complex portrait of western civilization, during the first decades of the twentieth century. In his narrative, the mix of prose and poetry, makes this novel like a fresco, not of color, but of words, those written in 1924 Thomas Mann. That novel – born since 1912 as a short story – from a brief stay in Switzerland, when the writer had visited his wife, hospitalized in a sanatorium, knowing an existential universe completely unknown to him. At the end of World War I, Thomas Mann rejoined the subject, starting with a broader approach, where the narrative horizon was much broader and complex: the human attitude towards the disease, death and sexuality. http://www.amazon.it/La-montagna-incantata-Thomas-Mann/dp/8863801681
In the narrative, is a young engineer sick what approaches to the environments of a sanatorium, knowing a woman – the wife of a Russian – he opens his heart, along with the ability to observe what is happening in the micro-cosmos from all over Europe. The illness of the protagonist disappears, along with an impossible love, leaving a war that knocks at the door, the duty not to commit suicide but diluted (as if his was a shade of death), in a new universe inscrutable. http://www.amazon.com/The-Magic-Mountain-Thomas-Mann/dp/0679772871