Quote:
Originally posted by Mary Meriam:
I spent many miserable years, dragging around Mann's The Magic Mountain, convinced that I had to read it, trying again and again, failing again and again.
However, I have read all of Soltzhenitsyn.
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The Magic Mountain is good until one of the characters dies (can't remember who--the protagonist's brother?) and after that it falls apart and becomes a series of unrelated segments that don't tell much of a story until Mann finally just decides to end it. It is magnificently written, but structurally it is lacking.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is very near the top of my list of great novels. I've read it dozens of times and taught it a lot. I love, too, the ending of
The Cancer Ward, which is a sentence fragment (at least in the translation I have): "An evil man threw tobacco in the eyes of the Rhesus monkey. Just like that."