Indeed, Hans positively revels in his status as one of the 'horizontal': There is a chilling ambiguity as to just how much of Hans's illness is genuine and how much the result of 'going native'. What was intended as a stay of a few weeks stretches into months, and then years, as Hans himself is diagnosed tubercular and dutifully takes his place among the cast of coughing consumptives.

This is a novel mystifyingly overlooked by Virginia Woolf in her 1926 essay On Being Ill, in which she bemoans literature's failure to make illness one of its 'prime themes' alongside 'love and battle and jealousy.' Well, here illness is decidedly centre-stage, and the plot – what there is of it – almost incidental: Hans Castorp, a naive young engineer, travels to the International Sanatorium Berghof high up in the Swiss Alps to visit his ailing cousin, Joachim Ziemssen. Set in a tuberculosis sanatorium during the years immediately prior to the Great War, this book is many things: a modernist classic, a traditional bildungsroman, a comedy of manners, an allegory of pre-war bourgeois Europe, and – perhaps most importantly this time of year – the ideal book to keep you company on the long winter nights, when whichever flu bug is doing the rounds has gained the upper hand and forced you into a sneezing retreat to your sickbed.įor The Magic Mountain is a work of sick-lit par excellence: a novel that convincingly portrays illness as a state of mind as well as of body (though Mann does not shy away from the more visceral aspects of the latter).

Buddenbrooks may be the precociously brilliant debut, Death in Venice the small-but-perfectly-formed novella, but for me, Mann's real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic of 1924, The Magic Mountain.

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