This book can really drag if you don’t look at it in the symbolic way it is meant to be read. There are several well anticipated climaxes, the last of which was one I had not anticipated. Between the loss of time in what is like a seeming Hotel California, The Berghof reeks of excess and silliness. Interestingly intermixed with that excess is death that happens there on a daily basis. Settembrini (a democratic humanist) and Naphta (a communistic totalitarian) debate and argue, trying to convince the young and innocent Hans of his respective philosophy over the other. In the midst of this, Hans is hopelessly in love with a woman who isn’t overly interested in him. At the end of it all, all things devolve into a nihilistic nightmare. It’s the pretty basic human condition. No system or political thought is without its faults and as long as humans are human, humanity will blunder and make a mess of things in the guise of following their completely right and unchallengeable beliefs.

The book culminates with WWI, and the reader wonders what all of that lost time was for?  It’s a pretty good picture of the blundering world now as we speak. Hans probably dies without his love and with no purpose in life that can be seen.

This is a heavy novel: it's physically heavy, textually dense, and philosophically massive. Make room for it. Make time. And then, as Mann himself recommends, read it twice. 

We know from the first chapter that we are in the hands of a master storyteller. The control of the action, of character, of selected dialogue moments, lets us know that the telling will be intimate and that--after our lengthy stay--we will be satisfied. As our protagonist Hans visits a sanatorium in Switzerland and slows down to meet it, so must we. 

Inside this isolated mountain retreat is a microcosm of pre-WWI Europe, but also a place of wonder, leisure, comforts, salaciousness, and philosophical debate. I found myself wanting to settle in and examine or research the myriad references and cultural-historical moments which Mann's characters summon, to slow down to better understand if the details of a gramophone or example of table manners resonated with a nuanced larger meaning. (Undoubtably, the answer is yes.)

I found myself arguing with the characters, with Hans for his naivete, with Settembrini for his sweeping and sometimes hypocritical generalizations, with Hofrat for his rhetorical smokescreens. No character exists as a symbol, exactly. Each is a fully-rendered and nuanced human, noble and broken, public and private, varied and changing. The space they inhabit is often absurd, false, even dangerous. But the people themselves are real and their experiences significant. 

It is easy today to draw parallels between these people of more than a century ago; we can build our own isolated communities easily enough, talk amongst ourselves to self-aggrandize without impact on the broader world, betray our better selves in acts of adolescent infatuations and pettiness. And we can even, when we fail to meet the questions of life or death honestly, make open war.

This is a too-seldom read novel of too-significant consequence to how our lives might be spent; or rather, how their might be lived.