I had nothing to say but, like Sontag, a lot to observe.Īs for me, I first read The Magic Mountain the summer before starting university. Dare I approach Thomas Mann-I, a 21-year-old Mexican student with a lot of reading behind me, true, but with all the gaucherie of one still ignorant of social and intellectual sophistication? Susan Sontag, in a memorable piece, has recalled how she, even younger than I, entered the inner sanctum of Thomas Mann’s house in Los Angeles in the 1940s, and found precious little to say, but much to observe. Carlos Fuentes recalls Sontag’s experience as he reflects on his encounter with Mann in Switzerland toward the end of Mann’s life: Sontag’s memory of her meeting with Mann seems to have become its own micro-genre: a report of an acute case of intellectual imposter syndrome inflicted by an encounter with Mann’s writing. Sontag and a friend of hers managed to get themselves invited to pay a visit at his house-that was the meeting she described in the quote above. She soon found out that Mann, exiled from Nazi Germany, was living very close to her, in Pacific Palisades, a secluded coastal neighborhood in Los Angeles. Here is how Susan Sontag put it, reminiscing about her first encounter with Thomas Mann: “Everything that surrounds my meeting with him has the color of shame.” Sontag read The Magic Mountain as a teenager in the 1940s and was captivated, but also intimidated. I should know, since I have spent the past few years studying other readers who have experienced it.
The novel in question is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Reader, I have a problem: I seem to be stuck on a novel that makes me feel bad about myself.
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