Leigh > Recent Status Updates

Finished Chapter Five with the incredible Walpurgisnacht section, in which our hero finally gets the courage to talk to his crush at the Halloween party, almost entirely in untranslated French… and she (not unkindly) ruins his life. Amazingly rich scene, building on what’s come before, playing with language-as-intimacy, and very very funny. Devastating fumble. And staged so cinematically! I picture Dustin Hoffman

Inch by inch! We are having a costume party which is appropriate for this time of year

Finished the women chapter!

Structure seems a little haphazard but it’s all good info!

Finished “The Dance of Death,” one of the longest sections in the book! I’m glad to see Hans Castorp (and Mann) finally engaging with some of the material realities underlying this sanatorium — people die! And even the visceral experience of having surgery. But it still often feels abstract & intellectualized. Interesting description of the “Bioscope” cinema and how it changes our relationship to time

I was already feeling targeted by Castorp’s intellectual musings about the two kinds of Latin before he started talking about Don Carlos 😅

Finished "Research" ("Forschungen") and I think it's my favorite section so far! It's just Hans sitting on his balcony reading (from anatomy to biology to chemistry to physics) but it stacks up such an ecstatic density of profound proclamations. Reminds me of reading Nietzsche. Also makes me realize this whole novel feels like an allegory of my experience at liberal arts college

The chapter about training plans (and writing them in pencil) hit me over the past few days as I try to process why that feels like the most profound part of this hobby to me. It’s project management, which I’ve always struggled with. And learning to value the “recovery run” or “easy run” as the essential meat & potatoes of the whole project, even though it doesn’t feel like operating at my full powers

Just finished “Humaniora,” which perhaps could also be titled “The Anatomy Lesson.” I can never decide whether this is a novel of ideas, or a parody of one! At one point (261) the narrator directly addresses the crisis/slippage of narrative voice — “such, at least, were Hans Castorp’s impressions, which we here reproduce.”

Enjoyable so far — narrator voice is pretty fun, plot seems to be a classic 2001/Alien/The Thing trope.

The Wunderlich interlude is nice. I was surprised he didn’t actually spell out the ways it was “not about running” but it’s no great mystery — we are all on a long mountain trail with no idea when we’ll reach the top or when the trail will come to an end.

“He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect — the part that exists inside her.”

We’ve hit the conventional low point of the rom com, right on schedule I guess, though Rooney’s formalist time-manipulation still leaves us in suspense about whether the worst is over. (Did something happen after the dinner party to drive her into the self-destructive semester in Sweden? I can’t remember whether we’ve been told this)

In the spirit of chapter 16 “measure success as many ways as you can” I’m going to celebrate making it 2% further in this audiobook tonight (after spending the day packing up my office)

Really enjoying chapter 2’s analysis of the positive feedback loop between gay nightlife and gay political consciousness.

Finished the first main chapter (supposedly on masculinity). I’m enjoying the analysis and especially the references to new songs to listen to, but I’m not too impressed by the disorganized structure.

“His attraction to her felt like an oncoming train, and he threw her under it.”

We almost had a conflict between two characters!! Almost.

There’s a brief moment where Joachim says “we seem to be cured; no fever” and they go for a walk, and that could have been the end of the novel… but then they run into Frau Chauchat and Hans gets so excited by her saying “good morning” that he spikes a fever of 100.4 lmao

The novelty is wearing off a bit and the slowness of the book is starting to wear on me. Hopefully I'll find a new source of motivation soon!

(after long hiatus) Chapter 4 complete! It feels SO Modernist: 1) super-intense inward gaze on the momentary minutiae of living, calling attention to the artificiality of the author’s authoring, and 2) a gradually dawning sense of existentialist absurdity "wait a minute… This whole institution is a sham” which could be extended to any institution. I wonder what's left to do in the remaining 75% of the novel lol