Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

What am I to say here? Well, at least I shall provide a counterpoint to these absurdly gushing reviews spread across the Amazon landscape. In short, this so-called "novel of ideas" is the most insipid, abstract, pettifogging work I've ever had the misfortune to plough through. Yes, yes, go on to tell me, in review after review, I'm missing its supposed "symphonic" structure and that I must bend over backward and touch my toes while reading it for a third time to fully appreciate it. Sorry, much like a Naptha or Settembrini, you're wasting your breath. This is the sort of thing schoolmarms say to students who don't fancy Jane Austen. Not one of the characters portrayed here is convincing. They all stand out like two dimensional set pieces. This applies especially to Hans Castorp, our supposed hero. He is more like an empty vessel filled with one fluid and then another as we move from chapter to chapter. I suspect this is why this is called a "novel of ideas" even though the two prominent ideologues here, Naptha and Settembrini, as our narrator points out (as if he needed to) contradict themselves time and time again. The overall effect is a distancing of the reader from what he is reading, a very unpleasant experience. Some of the reviewers here (whatever are they thinking?) compare this book (and favourably!) to Proust. No two different writers could possibly exist. Proust's beautiful, poetic cadences pull the reader into his world from the first pages of the Overture to the last pages of his three thousand page opus. At the end, it is no exaggeration to say that one feels as if s/he IS the narrator Marcel and has emerged from his deep contemplation of time, like him, with an entirely new perspective on the world. ----Not so here. I feel more distant from Hans than I did when I first picked the book up. And I don't feel anything but deflated by the empty chattering about time as a concept herein. Regarding this novel as a Bildungsroman, I couldn't help thinking of how terribly it suffers in comparison to Maugham's Of Human Bondage, where, heaven forefend, things actually happen to fully threshed-out characters, to whom one can actually relate. And in which the young man of the story, Phillip Carey, is entirely sympathetic in his harrowing process of maturity. It too has its many highbrow intellectual discussions. But Phillip ingests these ideas. They become a part of him. They affect how he acts and feels during his coming of age in the world. In other words, he is everything Hans is not. Yes, yes no doubt I'm not "getting" it, I hear readers of this review exclaiming, along with Thomas Mann, who in his Letters, recently published in English, states many times how taken aback he is that readers and critics do not realize the homoerotic feelings of Hans for his cousin, Joachim, in the book. ---Well, readers, did you "get" that part, so important to Mann? Please, unbiased reader, DO NOT bother with this book. Read Proust. Read Maugham. Read Beatrix Potter. Read ANYTHING but this mass of boring, silly confabulations. Now that I've offended all the Mann aficionados with this review, do carry on and crucify it by pressing the "Not Helpful" button in a sense of outrage in my insulting of your favourite book. I'm simply telling the truth. It will be worth having written it if only one dissatisfied reader, who, like myself, can not understand what all the fuss is about, appreciates it.--Please, don't tarry, declare it "moribund" and push it down the icy slopes on a toboggan.