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Possible future #SFFBookClub book? (largely on the strength of bookwyrm.social/user/sohkamyung/review/10090007 )

Whew. This volume really brings home the grotesqueness of war in general and Japan's war in particular. It was already gut-wrenching to read, and then just a week after finishing it it suddenly felt very topical. Will we ever learn?

I think I might set this book aside for a bit. I enjoyed it a lot for... oh about the length of a typical modern novel. But the slowness of the story is starting to drag, and I'm getting tired of how much of the story is now about Hans Castorp's exceedingly middle school crush on a woman he'll do anything for a chance to gaze upon but heaven forbid actually speaking to her beyond the most formal of pleasantries.

I'm not sure if I'm giving up on this or just taking a break, but I need to read something faster paced and with a less tiny world.

@Flauschbuch@bookrastinating.com I can imagine! My German is too limited for me to really see for myself whether the translation gets it right, but I can certainly tell you that the older translation feels much more like a distinctive authorial voice. So far that voice is my favourite thing about the book.

@Paranoid-Fish@bookwyrm.social I think I got used to liking newer translations better for really old literature (Beowulf, ancient Greek), because those inherently have to do some updating (translating Homer in Old English isn't really going to help me), so bringing it all the way to modern English seems like it leaves less friction. But this book's only 100 years old, and I routinely read work written in the English of that time, so translating it to the same seems to work better.

To my surprise, I like the older translation better. The newer one feels a bit bland, and over-explainy (e.g. I don't actually need to know the specific phonology of the "Hamburg accent" Mann refers to, and describing that doesn't make much sense when I'm not reading the dialogue in German). I should probably add the other translation as its own book and switch over to it.

Meanwhile, I was very amused yesterday to learn that this story of a man who thinks he's going to a sanatorium for three weeks and ends up there for seven years was originally conceived as a novella, and in the end it took Mann 12 years to write the 750-page doorstopper. Life imitating art imitating life and so on.

@picklish@books.theunseen.city oh! This is a good idea.

Hey you! (Yes, you!) If you're seeing this, then you probably have an adjacent taste in books, so this could likely be of interest to you.

We're reading The King Must Die during this February for #SFFBookClub.

SFFBookClub is an asynchronous fediverse book club. There's no meeting or commitment. If this book looks interesting to you, then you can join in by reading it during February and posting on the hash tag #SFFBookClub with any feelings or thoughts or reviews or quotes.

More details: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/