Magician
by H
About This Novel
Colm Tóibín, the author of "The Master" and "Brooklyn", is the latest novel to restore a Thomas Mann full of desires and secrets. The British Frio Literary Award-winning work was selected as one of the top ten historical novels of 2021 by The New York Times, and was selected as the annual book by The Washington Post, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg Businessweek. "The Magician" opens in the small German town of Lübeck at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, where the boy Thomas Mann grew up with a conservative father who was bound by ethics and a charming and elusive mother from Brazil. Young Mann hid his artistic ambitions from his father and his sexual orientation from everyone. He was attracted by the richest and most educated Jewish family in Munich, married the family's daughter Katia, and had six children. While on vacation in Italy, Mann developed a desire for a boy he met on the beach and wrote the story of "Death in Venice." While accompanying Katia to recuperate in Switzerland, he was fascinated by the inescapable mountain atmosphere and wrote "The Magic Mountain". He became the most successful novelist of his time, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and people repeatedly looked forward to his political statements. He fled Germany and traveled to Switzerland, France, and the United States. His wanderings ended in Kirchberg, south of Zurich. This is an epic family saga set across half a century, through World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II and the Cold War. Tóibín crafts a complex yet sympathetic writer who has struggled throughout his life with his inner desires, his family, and the turbulent times they lived through.
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