A Review of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain
by Adam Dalva
-70
I know what I’m wearing for my date.
-68
I don’t know what I’m wearing for my date.
-64
I know what I’m wearing for my date. I grab Magic Mountain.
-3
I am three minutes early. Not wanting to seem eager, I go around the block again, trying to de-frizz what my hat has wreaked. I’ve only ever seen my date at direct online angles, so the sidewalks are fraught with possibility.
0
I enter the restaurant and provide each blurred moon face a personalized smile. The low-level prosopagnosia clears up. She is not present. The room is three quarters empty — it is always three quarters empty — but I’ve made a reservation to avoid standing by the door.
1
Standard preliminary fiddling ensues at my table. I’ve opted for the booth seat: the back of my head looks nice in mirrors; no watching myself chew. Also, I usually shred paper napkins and leave them clustered at my feet, and the table will provide a handy buffer. My left profile is toward the door. Forget good side, we’re talking great side. Firm-jawed, the widow’s peak a beginner’s slope. My right side has a mole and a twitch and I can’t even really smile with it.
2
She is, of course, not even late in the age of the fifteen-minute acceptability buffer, so there will potentially be time to kill. Unfortunately, our contemporary attention span has made staring slackly into neutral space impossible. I pull out Magic Mountain.
3
I worry that this makes me seem pretentious (the novel in question is an opus spanning six years in a sanatorium whose main action is inaction).
4
I order a drink, hoping to introduce a pleasant slow-paced rhythm to the evening, the dizzying possibility of bar after.
5
I peruse the menu, knowing full well that I’ll have to act like I’m reading it for the first time later. (The delicate dance of establishing the vegetarian/vegan axis and resolving questions of multiple courses (I once had a date order a shrimp cocktail appetizer and a second shrimp cocktail main.).)
6
Magic Mountain has a moment so romantic that I missed my subway stop for it: Hans Catsorp asks Clavdia Chauchat (a perfect example of how a composite of idiosyncrasies (slamming doors) and flourishes (the soft veins in her skin) trumps mere adjectival praise) for a pencil. In Magic Mountain, the mundane often becomes exciting. The scene is a callback to Hans’s youth, when he asked a lovely boy for a pencil. I won’t share this with my date; the amount of background draws dangerously close to lecturing. But I do wish that I could tell her that Hans keeps Clavdia’s chest X-ray on his person for erotic reasons!
7
I’m going to have a salad with grilled chicken, I think. The potential issue is that when I order ruffage on dates, the busser will, oh, 70% of the time, place it in front of her and her burger/calzone/shepherd’s pie in front of me, and the gendered normalization will be uncomfortable for all three involved. Do people order heavy food on dates to demonstrate avidness or nonchalance? I myself trend chalant.
8
Another problem with reading is that it makes my eyes go lidded. My chin-scruff intensifies and I resemble a penitent pre-meal Benedictine. I briefly consider holding the book vertical, but that seems ostentatious, so I keep my face level. I am currently in one of the book’s centerpiece debates between Settembrini, an Italian secular humanist, and his loathsome Jesuit counterpart, Naphta. It’s a triumph of relativism. Settembrini, usually annoying, becomes delightful via contrast.
9
My adrenaline spikes every time the door opens; in the last nine minutes, I’ve beamed at four different men in glasses.
10
I have become convinced that I need to use the restroom, but somehow decide that this would be unacceptable.
11
My favorite part of the book will turn out to be Magic Mountain’s ski sequence. Trapped in the snow, Hans hallucinates the novel’s ending, and then, with 200 pages to go, forgets it again. The actual denoument is thus allowed to be fabulously abrupt.
12
A brief list of books that I would more ideally be reading before this date: The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel; Palm of the Hand Stories; Hopscotch; Last Evenings on Earth; Lunch Poems; We the Animals; Crush.
13
If she only texted! Then I could reply, “it’s okay I have a book.” Perhaps she is on the subway. Or dead. Perhaps she is sitting in a similarly-named restaurant trying to avoid going to the bathroom and wondering why I haven’t texted.
14
Fiction often works with a sort of odd chronological exponential decay, but in Mann, the telling of the first week is as long as he’ll take with the rest of the first year (it's somewhat related, I’d posit, to the phenomenon of time seeming to go faster as we age). This simulated mundanity allows the simplest acts, like pencil borrowing, seem massive.
15
The date buffer has arrived. And she is not here. I will order for one, will feel the pitying glance of the waiter and the polite disappointment of the hostess. At some point in the 2050s, I’ll stand on some sort of dock in what was once mid-continent America and will look at the surging ocean and realize that despite my life’s accomplishments (an “essay” on this “website”!; between four and seven friends!; the multiple times I passed the learner’s permit written exam!), it’s all empty. No one will even attend when my body is dropped into the ocean in a ritualistic sacrifice to the merciless gods.
16
She enters. I leap to my feet, all eagerness, stuttering assorted forgivenesses, apologies, condolences. She asks what I’m reading. I rotate the cover toward her. She says, “huh.”
604
I realize I left Magic Mountain under the table and don’t retrieve it for four days.
Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Guardian. His graphic novel, OLIVIA TWIST, was published by Dark Horse in 2019. Adam serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and is a book critic for Guernica Magazine. He teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University and Marymount Manhattan College. Adam is a graduate of NYU's Fiction MFA Program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow.
