Books on the politics of literary works can go wrong in at least two ways: They can reduce the significance of a literary work to the politics of its author or time (and great works are always about more than mere politics), or they can read today’s politics back into the original work, saddling authors with ideas that would be entirely foreign to them. Admirably, the critic Morten Høi Jensen avoids both of these errors in The Master of Contradiction: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain” as he retraces the personal and political contexts of Mann’s most famous novel.