*The Master of Contradictions*

The author is Morten Jensen, and the subtitle is Thomans Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain.  An excellent introduction to Mann’s tome, and it many fine discussions.  Here is one excerpt:

It becomes possible, then, to read The Magic Mountain as a novel partly about the limits and failures of the more positivistic strain of nineteenth-century liberalism — a triumphalist worldview that failed to recognize or halt Europe’s drift toward nationalism, reaction, and the industrial carnage of the First World War. Settembrini, the noveläs representative of this worldview, shares its myriad flaws, beliving, for instance, that self-perfection is the ultimate goal of humankind.  And like so many nineteenth-century liberal utopians, he celebrates technology as “the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, furthering their knowledge of one another, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations.

…More than just a vessel for a philosophical point of view, however, Settembrini is, or becomes, one of The Magic Mountain’s most endearing characters.  One cannot help but smile a little — half with affection, half with pity — whenever he enters the stage.  It’s one of the novel’s great distinctions that its central characters are never merely reducible to the philosophical worldview they represent; Settembrini, even when Mann is at his most sarcastic, is always first and foremost Settembrini, as if Mann were gradually convinced by his fictional creation as a dynamic individual rather than a static representation.

Recommended.