The Magic Mountain’s pages compress progressively more narrated time as it proceeds

Evidence

Thomas Mann sets up his Magic Mountain as a “novel of time” that not only reflects on the paradoxes of the experience of time but even makes acceleration the principle of its narrative structure: time flows faster and faster as the novel progresses, so that the same number of pages recount a few hours of narrated time at the beginning of the book that later portray days and then weeks, until by the end of the work months and years are compressed into a few pages. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 167

Categorization

• CANDY: A lovely cocktail-party fact: Mann literally built acceleration into his novel’s page-to-time ratio.