Not all books have to focus on the plot. Mann wasn't trying to achieve the same things as Dostoyevsky; you might as well say Tolkien is lazier than Sanderson because we don't get a videogame tutorial chapter explaining the rules governing Gandalf's magic.

Castorp learns and grows throughout the book. On one level it's about that growth >!and it's futility!<; on another, the characters Castorp meets allow the reader to explore Europe in the years leading up to WW1, as well as Mann's changing opinions on Europe and his hindsight about the war and the zeitgeist that led to it. It's notable that he began the book in 1912 and slowly revised it over the next decade, as the war changed his own viewpoints on Germany and on Europe as a whole.

Different novels have differents approaches to tackling their themes. In The Magic Mountain, Mann made the sanatorium and its patients into a metaphor for pre-WWI Europe, and at the same time, the book serves as both a classical Bildungsroman (with Hans Castorp learning all sorts of things, from falling seriously in love for the first time to witnessing the ideological clashes between Settembrini's humanism and Naphta's radicalism) and a sort-of parody of a Bildungsroman, as well as a subversion of it (Hans, after all, doesn't change much and, instead of growing up and finding success, >!enlists in the army and possibly dies in the war!<).

It also deals with how we perceive time and its passing; Hans' first three weeks in Berghof are meticulously detailed over the course of the first 200 or so pages, but then, as he loses track of time and years pass, the level of detail goes down, and leaps forward in time become more frequent, so that the reader too ends up unsure about how much time has passed.

I feel The Magic Mountain is one of those books that, just like The Brothers Karamazov, only benefits from re-reading. Mann packed it so full of ideas and themes, there's always something new to glean from it, just like with his other works, such as Joseph and His Brothers.

You say it's a great book, yet you dismiss the very aspects that make it a great book. That in itself feels like a cop out, no offense.

As others have already said: it's a book about the zeitgeist in Europe prior to WW1. And it's set in a sanatorium of all places. I've always taken the slow pacing and the mundaneness of the novel to be an essential part of the narrative. You are meant to be bored, and you're meant to feel like you're losing your mind reading it. It's a hard read for sure, but by design.

Now that's a take!

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It’s not really about the plot, it’s about the atmosphere and surreal feeling of that somewhat otherworldly and sequestered place which Castorp finds himself, in the dying days of old Europe.

You seem to understand "plot" on very superficial level. A book does not need a complex plot to be great. On the Beach by Nevil Shute is another one of my favorite novels, and on a surface level, it also doesn't have a complex plot; rather, the character interactions make it great.

The exploration of ideas is the actual substance, and doing that through characters that represent ideas, ideals and ideologies is exactly where the novel shows its strengths as an art form. Simply writing a sermon about your ideas is what would be lazy; there's nothing lazy about TMM unless your understanding of plot is simply that "things happen".

If you’re going to get into modernist literature it’s important to understand that it was a time when writers were trying to get away from the formal structures which had traditionally defined literature in favour of an expression of aesthetics and a mélange of emotional experience.

To try and assess a book like Der Zauerberg within a framework of traditional literary structure is like assessing a painting by Paul Klee on the basis of how physically accurate he renders his subjects, or to say that a cake is badly cooked because it doesn’t taste like a rack of lamb.

I'll give you the latter, I guess I mean just "learns". To be fair, there is an entire subgenre of Russian novels about young men who do nothing, don't change or grow at all, and then die.

Complexity can be seen in more than just the book's plot. Henry James has some very simple stories (The Ambassadors), but uses complex prose that elevates it above what it would be if anyone else had written the same story.

On the other hand, Hemingway uses fairly plain prose to write stories which are sometimes incredibly simple on the surface level (Big Two-Hearted River and Old Man and the Sea, for example) - and yet their meanings and the complexity of their characters are debated to this day. Would you say that everyone who studies those works is wrong, and you can simply dismiss them out of hand because not much happens at the story level?

The phrase often used to describe Mann’s work is that they are “novels of ideas.” I always struggled with this description because I think every compelling novel is full of ideas, but in Mann’s case, I think the phrase is intended to signal a focus on the implications of events (what do events mean) rather than the sheer narrative excitement of the events themselves. In Mann’s work, the reader is asked to do more of the work of interpretation than in a plot-based novel, which is possibly why the narrative seems “lazy.”

Mann’s kind of novel isn’t for everyone, but there are too many wonderful books in the world to worry about that! For me, this has been a really worthwhile discussion because it’s allowed me to think through a term that has puzzled me for years. Cheers.

Takeaway: people really don't like criticism of "The Magic Mountain." (For the record, I've never read it and don't plan to.)

OP, you would probably enjoy what one of my favorite Goodreads reviewers has to say about the book.

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Literature is an art form and can be beautiful in itself. There doesn’t need to be a rigid plot for a book to good. In fact, it’s probably harder to write a good book without a plot because there isn’t the structure to use as a crutch.

Take something like Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. It’s a beautiful plotless masterpiece and goes against conventional writing. I would much rather read that than some bland, basic hero’s journey that follows a strict plot structure

What is the Russian subgenre that you mentioned? Can you please give some examples of novels or authors?

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It's the "superfluous man" novel. Probably the most famous example is Eugene Onegin, but other well-known books are A Hero of Our Time and Diary of a Superfluous Man.

I enjoy reading good criticism, even of books I like. "Thomas Mann sucks because he didn't write the exciting adventure I would have preferred to read" isn't good criticism.

Take it up with OP then lol, I said I haven't read the book.