The Ministry of Time

A friend recommended this new sci-fi novel from an author I'd never heard of.  Its a breezy, entertaining, forgettable, and not really science fiction even.  In fact, it's more of a romance novel with some light time travel grafted onto it.  While the writer is perfectly competent at making the pages turn (no mean feat), there didn't seem to be much intellectual substance to the novel beyond some vague implications that the British Empire might not have been wholly a good and glorious thing.  

The plot centers around the way that 'expats' can fall in love with another one simply because they feel out of place in their new society.  The narrator is a really quite helpless and annoying first generation British woman whose mother is a Cambodian refugee.  She falls in love with a mid-19th-century British explorer who was plucked from arctic starvation by the titular Ministry's new time machine.  The past, it seems, is a foreign country.  But a sexy one!

The Magic Mountain

Sometimes, the great books just aren't. I found Thomas Mann's classic pretty underwhelming.  It's long.  It's kinda boring plot wise -- the narrator at one point evens calls it an attempt to tell the story of time passing.  It features too many epic philosophical debates between a humanist and a Jesuit that end up sounding like just so much sophomore dorm room bullshit.  And it's filled with interminable descriptions of the way the snow glistened and her eyes looks and the exact dimensions of the latest stereo system.  

Perhaps, in its defense, we can imagine the way it may have spoken to its moment when it was published in 1924.  The novel is set almost entirely in a Swiss sanatorium before the outbreak of WW1.  It describes an idyllic world of 'illness' completely removed from the 'healthy' goal driven "flatlands" of Germany, where our hero Hans Catorp spend years on end recovering from even a hint of tuberculosis and other maladies of the age.  In other words, it depicts a seemingly endless and meaningless pause in the 'real' life of the world below, a sort of aristocratic nihilism where the values of discipline, productivity, and efficacy no longer have the same import.  When the madness of war gradually intervenes in its final pages, the question of what is 'sick' and what 'healthy' takes on a new poignancy.  I can only imagine that in Weimar Germany this may have struck a chord we can no longer hear.