Episode 666 - Morten Hoi Jensen

With THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale University Press), Morten Høi Jensen brings us a masterful biography of one of the great novels of the 20th century and shows how it and its author speak to our present moment. We talk about Morten's history with Mann's novel, his weeks of research in the sanatoria of Davos and his discovery of how much of The Magic Mountain's world is intact a century later, and how Mann's novel changed for him in the process of writing this book. We get into Mann's political transformation from a nationalist into an antifascist, how art & politics can make for a disastrous mix, Mann's rivalry with his novelist brother Heinrich, and what it was like to write about a novel about life in a TB clinic while in the middle of a pandemic. We also discuss the weird connection I draw between Mann and Thomas Pynchon, how Morten became a literary biographer via the biography of another novel, spiritualism before and after WWI, how he came around on the chapter of The Magic Mountain that bored him in his earlier readings, why Robert Musil resented Mann, whether it's okay to write margin notes and never look at them, and more. Follow Morten on Instagram and Bluesky • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter