17I discovered for myself new type of novel reading this book. The novel is fictional and tells us a story. But what is more interesting is that Thomas Mann exists in the book himself. He comments on events and characters, he expresses his own subjective judgements in parallel to objectively narrating the story. Author spends a lot of time on side topics: like philosophy, chemistry etc.
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19The bigger topic that crosses the whole book is Mann's philosophical reflections on the topics of time and space.
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21Magic Mountain reminded me of The Dead Souls by Gogol. It is a story with a characters that were mostly unlikable by me, especially at the beginning. Those characters seem to be not the role models, they had problems and some not impressive features. However, book had a lot of different characters, and maybe it was the Mann's point to show us, that no one is ideal in reality.