![]() Its patients suffer a myopia whose reach does not extend further than the sickness at hand. It’s a place where the shortest unit of time is the month and where sickness is nearly a fetish. ![]() The Sanatorium Berghof, an alpine retreat for the terminally ill, is a place of prescribed rest cure, three-a-day constitutionals and idle entertainments. ![]() By the time he completed it in 1924, the sickness of the body had become further distorted into the sickness of the body politic, and his novel became a reification of the period’s irrationalism. Though Thomas Mann began work on The Magic Mountain in 1912 when he visited his ailing wife at a sanatorium (which served as the model for the Berghof of his novel), his writing soon bent to a different angle when war broke out two years later. There are even fewer that play with it as a state of mind or treat it as the defunct policy of nation states. There are few novels that give sickness its due. ![]()
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