uma colecção de nostalgias

"Irony has many meanings in literature, and the irony of one age is rarely the irony of another. My experience of imaginative writing is that it always possesses some degree of irony, which is what Oscar Wilde meant when he warned that all bad poetry is sincere. But irony is not the condition of literary language itself, and meaning is not always a wandering exile. Irony broadly means saying one thing and meaning another, sometimes even the opposite of what is being said. Mann's irony is frequently a subtle kind of parody, but the reader open to The Magic Mountain will find it a novel of gentle high seriousness, and ultimately a work of great passion, intellectual and emotional.

Mann's wonderful story now primarily offers not irony nor parody, but a loving vision of reality now vanished, of a European high culture now forever gone, the culture of Goethe and of Freud. In 2000, a reader must experience The Magic Mountain as a historical novel, the monument of a lost humanism. Published in 1924, the novel portrays the Europe that was to begin to break apart in World War I, the catastrophe that Hans Castorp descends his Magic Mountain in order to join. Much of humanistic culture survived the great war, but Mann prophetically senses the Nazi horror that was to take power a short decade after his novel's appearance. Where Mann may have intended a loving parody of European culture, the counterironies of change, time, and destruction make The Magic Mountain, in the year 2000, an immensely poignant study of the nostalgias."

H. Bloom em How to Read and Why

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saber que Nostalgia vai estar num grande ecrã e eu não vou poder lá estar. ainda dentro da temporada ccb, recordo a primeira vez que ouvi Louis Lortie, em casa, e o comentário da altura. dizer adeus à Montanha não é fácil.