While I normally discuss SF stories here, one piece of official high-brow "literature" has been nagging at me lately for a timely mention. Timely, because like H.G. Wells' later works, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain can't help but find inauspicious parallels in modern culture.
Hans Castorp flounders about for a few hundred pages in an era of masked concupiscence, overt sexual condemnation and repression yet also widespread monetization of sexuality, of popular activism proliferating with little impetus from or anchoring in reality and based instead on critical theories, of incoherent "personalities" babbling their audience into submission and a terminally insecure crop of youth desperate to be conscripted in any conflict which might lend legitimacy. Are your ears burning yet? That the whole novel takes place in a sanatorium, an emblematic safe space, is just the icing on the cake.
I won't bother with a synopsis or general impressions. The book's been inexorably analyzed into zombiehood by a century's worth of Lit. majors across two continents. You'll easily find theses on its significance to everything from spaceships to corn futures. I will, however, encourage you to read it, and keep in mind at all times that it seats its various tongue-in-cheek philosophical diatribes in a nucleus of sickness estranged from reality, a fantasy land of malady and contagion, choking the very breath from your lungs. If its various characters' seductive promises of agency by enrollment echo too closely the indulgent feel-good, empowering popular philosophies of today, try to remember where the spread of such memetic infection led the society of Mann's time.
In fact, he'll eventually remind you.
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