The Magician by Colm Toibin
The Magician begins in a small-town German city at the start of the 20th century, when Thomas Mann grows up with a traditional father who is constrained by decorum and an attractive and unpredictable Brazilian mother. Young Mann keeps his father in the dark about his goal to become an artist and about his homosexual orientation. He marries Katia, a member of one of Munich’s wealthiest and most affluent Jewish families, because of his love for them. They have six kids in total. He wrote the story Death in Venice while on vacation in Italy because he yearns for a boy he sees on a beach. He is the most famous novelist of his generation, a Nobel Prize laureate in literature and a public figure whose private life is kept a mystery.
The Magician by Colm Toibin
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The Magician is a magisterial work that gently examines the inner life of one of the greatest authors of its time while providing a broad overview of twentieth-century history. The depth of Tóibn’s writing, which spans the advent of the Nazis, Mann’s need to flee Germany with his Jewish wife and family, and his tumultuous years in America, would have overwhelmed a less accomplished writer. However, The Magician is a fiction, not a biography, and Tóibn’s attention is always on Mann himself, his homo-erotic yearnings, his odd distance from his troubled childhood, and the manner in which he drew on his own experiences to produce his books.
It is the author Thomas Mann’s biography, yet it is more than a straightforward account of his life’s events. What I appreciate most about this author is that he also provides us with a rich understanding of the psychological aspects of his character, allowing us to know what is going through his mind and why he does or does not act in a specific way. Despite having certain gay tendencies, Thomas Mann married and had five children. The aspect of his perspective on his relationship with and how his kids perceived him was what I enjoyed the most. His wife was yet another fascinating and powerful figure.
All the acclaim that has been given to this work is well-deserved. It is masterfully written, with fully developed characters, and is skillfully emotionally resonant. The focus is appropriately on Mann, his family, and his environment; the author resists the urge to use the subject as an opportunity to write a history of the time. His actions and thoughts are occasionally presented in a more abstract manner than those of others.
