Some of the issues in Mann's Magic Mountain

Reading for I think the 3^rd time Thomas Mann’s 192 novel, The Magic Mountain, and finding it, through the first 100 pp or so (and it’s a 700+-page novel) to be just as I remembered it, smart and engaging and mysterious, sometimes esoteric but always within reach, the classic 20^th-century “novel of ideas.” I actually recollected some of the events surprisingly well – so often I’ve gone back to a classic and it was as if I were reading the novel for the first time – but of course there’s always an extra richness to go through a novel when you have a pretty good idea of the outline of the plot and you can therefore focus your attention more on character, setting, and the ideas the the characters (and the narrator in this case) articulate. There’s also – and I see this more on the current reading – a creepiness about this novel that almost makes it a grand horror story: the 24-year-old Hans Castorp, taking what he believes will be a 3-week vacation (he’s an apprentice ship-building/design) to visit his cousin, Joachim, who is a patient at a TB sanatorium in Davos. Joachim and the 2 doctors who run the sanatorium encourage H to follow all the protocols of the patients: long resting periods on their outdoor balconies, an abundance of food (and drink), casual walks – what could be wrong w/ that? But has Hans follows the protocol, he begins to show signs of incipient disease and he battens down for a long stay. Is he just succumbing to an innate laziness and dilettantism? It’s as if he, and many of the others, are captives; there’s a weird sense that no-one gets well, that there all are doomed (as in life itself?). Plus, there are the pansexual yearnings; on arrival, Hans is seriously upset by the sounds of sex coming from the Russian couple in the adjacent room; over the course of his stay, he becomes attracted to a beautiful Russian woman patient, but in his dilatory way he can never quite approach her – but he recognizes that she reminds him of a childhood crush he’d had (he would never put it that way) on a young man in his school. The issue of Hans’s repressed homosexuality (and Mann’s?) is unspoken but omnipresent, which may be one of the reasons for Hans’s illness (bleeding profusely from the nose) and his unwillingness to return to his diurnal life.