Next up was Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It was an interesting spin on the standard bildungsroman where instead of traveling to have the world of culture, art, and philosophy revealed to him, Hans Castorp stays in one place and has all of WWI Europe visit. He's the same kind of naive weiner as Philip Carey and Augie March, but Thomas Mann seems to be having more fun with him. From the moment of his arrival at the sanatorium to visit his cousin, Mann puts Castorp in a Catch-22-like paradox where he must prove his wellness to leave, then eventually demands to stay once he's well enough to go. As the situation goes on and on it becomes less funny and takes on more of a creepy, Shining-like inevitable trap where the passage of time gets blurrier and blurrier. Thankfully Castrop alternates between the old fashioned young dope extremes of unjustified indignation and cockeyed optimism, keeping most of the 700 pages fairly fun.
There are a ton of symbolic characters in the book (more than half of which sailed over my post-war head). My favorites were the ever arguing and politically opposed duo of Settembrini and Naphta who I took to be early 20th Century representations of Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken:
Two loudmouths who really can't live without each other. A love story as old as time itself...
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