Sensational snippets: The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann

I'm reading Thomas Mann's the Magic Mountain, and I came across this:

Quite a bit of reading went on the international sanatorium Berghof, both in the common lounge areas and on private balcony – this was in particular the case of newcomers and short-termers, since residents of many months or even years had long ago learned how to plague time without diverting or service their thoughts, bring in time behind them had become virtuosi, and stated openly that only need a book to clumsy bunglers in art to hang on. At the most they can a book lying on their round or within easy reach on a table – which are sufficient for them to find their reading needs taken care of. The sanatorium library was a polyglot affair with lots of illustrated work – an expanded version of the kind of thing that serves to entertain patients in a dentist's waiting room – and its services offered free of charge. People exchanged novels from the lending library application template down in Platz. Now and then seems to be a publication that everyone fought, and even those who had given by reading for grab would only pretended, with disinterest. In the period that we describe here, the art of seduction, a badly printed booklet that Herr Albin had introduced, was making the rounds. It was almost word for Word from French translated with perfectly preserved the original syntax, even loans of a certain attitude and tantalizing elegance to her exposition of a philosophy of physical love and debauchery, all in a spirit of life-affirming paganism. Frau Stöhr had soon read and found it ' beautiful '. Frau Magnus-who was losing protein-supported her unconditionally.  Her husband, Dale, personally claimed to have benefited from reading it, but regrets that his wife had read, since that sort of thing just ' spoiled ' women and gave them immodest ideas.  His comments significantly increased demand for the publication.

The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, translated by John e. Woods, Everyman's Library, Knopf, 1995, p. 324

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

View the original article here