Wow – this is a BIG book. It took me a whole month to read, and I usually read at least two books a week! It’s not just that it had 700 plus pages (I’ve read other doorstops with similarly many pages) but that each page is so densely packed. It’s amazing actually that a book can be so dense and long and yet not very much happens. There are a lot of big words, which I often had to pause to look up the meaning of, not to mention the phrases, paragraphs and on one occasion whole chapter written in languages other than English and not translated.
It’s a coming of age tale of sorts, with a main protagonist, Hans Castorp, who is a newly qualified engineer. He goes to visit his cousin, a patient at a sanitorium in the Swiss alps, supposedly for three weeks but ends up staying for seven years.
The patients spend their time eating and sleeping and talking about philosophy and politics and religion and deep stuff like that. I don’t know if I was bored, as such, but it was definitely a slog to get through – I did really enjoy bits of it, and found some of the passages both very thought provoking and sometimes very moving. It’s a book that I have heard referred to so many times that I thought I really ought to read it, and I’m glad I have but I’ll not hurry to read it again!
Sarah Wray Writer 