ŷ������

It is a hundred years since Thomas Mann has written The Magic Mountain (TMM). I’ve read TMM twice. The first time i’ve struggled and the second time I’ve absolutely admired that novel. So i thought it would be a good way to celebrate by reading the newly translated novel by Olga Tokarczuk that was clearly inspired by Mann.

I have to admit that in retrospect i’d prefer i knew nothing about TMM before reading this book as inevitably i could not help but compare this novel to TMM and struggled to appreciate it on its own terms. Olga did not help as for the first half at least she stuck to her version of Mann’s style with detailed descriptions of the surroundings including the meals and physical countenances of her characters. The majority of them could as well be traced to Mann’s characters. She subverted the style and plot of course. But for me she did not do it boldly enough until the later part of her novel.

Also what makes Mann’s work so rich is an exchange of ideas between the characters. All of them are profound, complex and rendered in such a way that the reader would never know Mann’s personal stand on those issues. Olga’s novel is much simpler on that level. Her characters talk about many things as well. But their views are quite shallow, deliberately cartoonish:

“Wojnicz (the main character standing for Hans Castrop in TMM) had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.��

And it seems that for her as well a historical perspective on misogyny is the main area of investigation in this novel. In this she is richly intertextual including the ancient Greeks, witch hunts and of course Mann’s contemporaries. However, i was not sure what was new about it. It is quite likely unfortunately that still there are some men in our times holding such views. It might even have been that they still hold the power in the society. But the criticism of that expressed in such a form does not come across as particularly effective. I do not think they would be shocked out of their convictions by reading that their views were wildly shared between the educated elite of the earlier 20th century. The rest of us are informed and do not need to be convinced.

As a result, the first part of the novel is a bit Disneyland Venice compared to the real Venice - lacking authenticity. Even the death which is grimly present in Mann’s novel is more like a decoration here, the way to approach the uncanny.

But the good news for me was that it seemed she started to write one book but finished writing another. And they transformed into each other relatively seamlessly. The latter part is characteristically Olga’s with her original taste for the uncanny, supernatural and its potential role in human perception. Also the feministic pathos of revenge is played quite nicely.

On its own terms the book was an easy and quick read and quite entertaining. That is as soon as I’ve managed to get out of Mann’s shadow. She writes effortlessly and manages to use interesting narrative voice - it is plural first person, but this she does manage to subvert from Mann’s similar tool rather impressively.

Mann was writing his novel with overshadowing of the WW1. I was thinking how did Olga use a century of hindsight for her benefit. There is misogyny theme of course. But also she clarified the idea of perspective, the absence of the binaries in the world, in human nature and even in human body. She did it in quite a categorical way through a monologue of the Doctor: “If anyone thinks the world is set of stark opposites, he is sick.�� The Doctor also explained to Wojnicz how the real world appeared to be: “blurred, out of focus, flickering�� depending on one’s point of view." He might have been enlightened about the very recent contemporary findings of the quantum physics. But more likely he projected Olga’s more modern knowledge popularised in many books such as The Order of Time.

Read this book for its plot, sense of humour, sense of place and vivid descriptions. Avoid reading Mann before it if you can. As far as the ideas are concerned, I’ve managed to find a paragraph which resonated and felt fresh:

“Our entire culture has grown out of a feeling of inferiority, out of all those unfulfilled ambitions. And yet it is the other way around: that which is weak in us gives us strength. This constant effort to compensate for weakness governs our entire lives. Demosthenes had a stammer, and that was exactly why he became the greatest speaker of all time. Not in spite of it, but because of it.��