The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann

"Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year."

Hans Castorp visits his cousin in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps for a three-week stay, but ends up remaining for seven years. Isolated from the world below, he becomes a student of the colorful characters around him—humanists, Jesuits, hedonists—who debate the great intellectual questions of the age as Europe marches inexorably toward World War I.

Thomas Mann's monumental novel is a portrait of a civilization on the brink of destruction. It is a complex philosophical inquiry into time, illness, and the conflict between the Enlightenment and the darker, irrational forces of the human spirit.