In order to make the education of his hero a realistic and demanding endeavor, Mann includes a welter of facts and fictions from the intellectual discourse of his time. Verbal duels of great intricacy are conducted over the span of many pages; scientific digressions assume the length of independent studies. The author succeeds almost always in containing these often amorphous pursuits by placing them into a tightly circumscribed locale and by distributing them among a small number of carefully studied players.

That the readers do not lose themselves in the garrulous display of intellectual bravado has also been vouchsafed by Mann's ironic style which invites them to view his firework of ideas from a healthy distance. As Castorp's education proceeds, he, too, begins to discriminate, dismiss, and even doubt the wisdom of an exclusively cerebral approach to life. The result is, of course, one of the most ironic...