Growing-up novel – Romansuche

The Magic Mountain

January 22, 2017 Growing-up novel

“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann is one of the most difficult books that I’ve read. I advice you not to read this book too fast. I could read one page 2-3 times before I understood what the author meant. This novel describes the life of tuberculosis sanatorium, which is located in the highlands of Switzerland. The main character, Hans Castorp, comes to stay with his cousin for three weeks, but, in the end, he remains there for a few years. The novel, of course, is boring. There is no exciting plot or at least just interesting events. It is about an ordinary sanatoriums life of seriously ill patients in all its terrible boredom, detailed down to the smallest details. To such tiniest ones that you will know in what color socks heroes were wearing today, what they ate for breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack and dinner, which was a body temperature in the morning and night, and so on. Why did the author do this? Perhaps for the reader to be accustomed to this especial atmosphere. And the atmosphere in the resort is quite original, with unusual blurred over time. Time seems to stop for the guests of sanatorium. They...

Demian

December 28, 2016 Growing-up novel, Novel

Demian is a philosophical novel, gloomy and mystical. We can consider it autobiographical as well – it is said in the foreword to the novel. It is a famous work, which had a huge impact on the writer’s further work, and the great Thomas Mann compared this book with The Sorrows of Young Werther. It is the story about a human being and how he is growing up and becoming a young man, who step by step moves farther away from the hypocritical norms of public morality and more and more reveals for himself his deep, dark personality. He is assisted by a mysterious friend of Demian – either the devil, or the mysterious deity, or just the product of the imagination of the main character… In the book, in theory, there are two main characters, as well as those who appear only for a couple of chapters, but also plays an important role and makes some changes. But missing the fact that the narrative is conducted only from one of the main characters – my attention was definitely focused on the second one. In any case, the title of the novel is his name – Demian. Who is Demian? Who knows. From the first pages he is a mystery and the word...

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