![]() ![]() and helps him to say things he could never have dared say in his own language. Chauchat, the Kirghis-eyed heroine, veiling its strangeness in the garment of a foreign tongue. At the end of the first volume, he makes an extraordinary declaration of love to Mine. ![]() I am reminded of the hero of my novel, the young engineer Hans Castorp. Oddly enough, it is not a difficulty for me, but rather the reverse, that I have to discuss The Magic Mountain in English. Likewise, when I tell you freely of the book’s genesis and my experiences with it, I am relying on the healthy and sympathetic attitude of the American mind toward the personal, the anecdotal, and the intimately human. ![]() In selecting my Magic Mountain for discussion, I base the choice on the sympathetic interest which this one of all my books received in America. Furthermore, since my work is still in the making and, I venture to hope, still reflects the present and its problems, it would be rather difficult, if not impossible, to criticize it with scholarly detachment - even if the critic were not, at the same time, the author. For, the thought of acting as my own historian I find a little confusing and, you know, there are few impartial historians anyway. SINCE it is certainly not customary for an author to discuss his own work, perhaps a word of apology, or at least of explanation, should occupy first place. ![]()
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