Paweł Huelle - Castorp

Paweł Huelle's novel, Castorp, takes as its premise a single line from Thomas Mann's, The Magic Mountain. Near the beginning of the masterpiece, Mann writes that protagonist Hans Castorp, “had spent four semesters at the Danzig Polytechnic”. It is from the springboard of this sentence that Huelle creates his novel, a prologue of sorts, which offers many of the ideas Mann was to flesh out in The Magic Mountain in nascent form.

The novel begins with Hans Castorp discussing his upcoming trip to Danzig to study with his uncle, Consul Tienappel, who had taken him in as a ward following the death of Castorp's parents. They are in disagreement as to whether Castorp should go, but go he must, and so he does. Huelle wastes little time setting up the pieces of his story, partly because a reader of The Magic Mountain would already know Castorp's background, but also because he isn't exactly at liberty to add too much to the areas in which Mann fleshed out.

Thus begins Huelle's constant tug-of-war with The Magic Mountain, and happily it is a battle which, though not successful, isn't exactly won, either. Huelle can't do too much with Castorp because the character was something of a “blank slate” when he ascended the mountain (one of the major themes of the novel was that Castorp's mind was a tabula rasa, ready and receptive toward being impressed with the major ideas circulating Europe at the time, as well as the ideas of the past.).

One of Huelle's successes is his accurate homage to Mann's writing style. The novel positively drips with irony, and the carefully constructed phrasing of Mann is replicated neatly. Huelle seems comfortable allowing his characters to slip into essayistic discourse, and his variety of topics is as wide and varied as Mann's. The narrator, too, has a developed sense of place, and comments freely on the happenstances of Castorp's life. The opening sentences of Chapter II makes the following comment:

Should we devote equal attention and just as many pages to the next few hours or perhaps the risings and settings of the sun during this voyage? The intelligent reader will have guessed, of course, where our question is leading: yes, we wanted to take a short cut, to make a simple change of perspective, because although this account will keep linear order throughout, not all of it needs to reflect every single hour or day in the life of Hans Castorp with the clarity of a looking-glass.

Which quite nicely echoes Mann's style. At any rate, Castorp makes his way to Danzig, where he meets a variety of people involved, at a philosophic or intellectual level, with the ideas of the time. Some of this is satirical, such as the clerk who has determined the average number of children drowned father's have during their lifetime, with the unhelpful and ridiculous suggestion to avoid engendering 3.4 children. But mostly Huelle plays it straight, planting the seeds of ideas and concepts that would, in The Magic Mountain, become fully fleshed out. Of paramount importance is time, with which Huelle has this to say:

Depending on which chink it entered, time could flow more quickly or more slowly, by compressing or diluting its consistency. Of course, the chink was his own, human mind, beyond which, as he knew from philosophy, time did not exist, at least in the sense that it could be divided off and distilled in a pure state. Holding on to this comparison, although he realised such an analogy was not perfect, he could surmise that events, like the flow of steam in a cylinder, went streaming through his consciousness, sometimes with greater, sometimes lesser pressure. Thus, if life really were driven along by time, he thought, as he boarded the Number One tram, handed the conducter his monthly ticket and took a free seat on the front platform, such a relationship could be expressed by means of a function running from the moment of birth to infinity.

It is not unreasonable to imagine this sentence nestled somewhere within Mann's masterpiece, and that, in a sentence, should speak to the quality of Huelle's novel.

The plot, as mentioned, is minimal, and it involves (another parallel) Castorp's obsession with an unobtainable woman. But the plot is really an excuse to inject ideas, and here Huelle succeeds quite well. He is quite adept at introducing new characters, each with their own obsession. Gray and Altenberg, characters who briefly appear at a spa resort where Castorp is receiving an electric water treatment, share the caustic and excited back and forth later to be experienced between Settembrini and Naphta. Gray says during an argument concerning music,

But Wagner? Beauty murdered by the fury of a maniac obsessed with the brass. What an unbearable excess – petty bourgeois pride amid fake palm trees, tapestries and swans cut out with a fret-saw!

And then Alternberg retorts with,

Enough! I won't have it! What do you mean by offering up some second cello?! A double bass line! Who gets excited about that nowadays? Art means emotions, but not the sort that take in a couple of aesthetes on an autumn afternoon. Don't you like choirs? Or an expanded orchestra? Typical wimp! Subtle combinations – everything has to agree: 'tra la la la' – the tune goes up, 'tra la la la' – down it comes in the next phrase. Like in your Bach. Predictability taken to the absolute degree.

And so on. There are a great many characters with a great many things to say, and here Huelle finds a resurgence of his primary problem – he can't have any one figure gain too much prominence for Castorp, for then we would have known about him in The Magic Mountain, and we assuredly didn't. So, people come and people go, and what they have to offer is interestingly presented but not always deeply discussed.

We have, then, a multi-sided problem. If you have read The Magic Mountain, then you appreciate the ideas seen in miniature in Huelle's Castorp. But at the same time, if you've read Mann's, the Huelle's doesn't add anything so much as compliment the work, and then in the manner in which an entrée compliments a main meal. If you haven't read Mann, then you don't notice the breadcrumbs Huelle has strewn about the text, and you are left to wonder why not much happens and why these interesting men and women appear, say something dazzling, and then leave before anything can be done with what is said.

So who, then, is the novel for? Perhaps the ideal reader would be one who wishes to read The Magic Mountain, and chooses Castorp as a sort of primer, an introduction if you will. But that, again, belies the quality of Huelle's writing, which is high, and the ambition of his work, which, in truth, largely succeeds. For a spiritual predecessor, this is just about ideal, and hits every note accurately. My recommendation would be to read it if you have an interest in Mann, or if you have read something by Mann (particularly and obviously The Magic Mountain, but anything is fine). It's quite amazing how well Huelle captures the tone and thematic depth of Mann's work, and the winks and nods hidden throughout the text only add to the pleasure. It's a flawed novel I would feel uncomfortable labelling as simply flawed, because it does pretty much exactly what it sets out to do, makes no bones about its goals, and achieves it just about as well as could be expected. A very good, but not quite great novel, but certainly one worth reading. I enjoyed every page, while simultaneously realising exactly what was missing, without having the slightest clue as to a better way to do it.

Author	Paweł Huelle
Title	Castorp (Original Title: Hans Castorp w Sopocie. Zaginiony rozdział z "Czarodziejskiej Góry")
Translator	Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Nationality	Polish
Publisher	Serpent's Tail
Published	2007 (English) 2004 (Polish)
Pages	233
Availability: ---Amazon (US)