Exiled to Switzerland in the early 1930s, Thomas Mann became frenzied by the private newspapers he had left behind in Germany. As Colm Toibin writes in “The Magician”, his biographical novel about Mann, the author “needed to get the journals out of Munich. If the Nazis took hold of them, it would surely be ruined. As a schoolboy, Tom experiments with male classmates; as an adult he looks at handsome men who cross his path.
Of course, this is not covertly spying from behind a pillar. Mann ogles so openly that when he is still single, a fellow writer brings up the subject in a cafe. Anyone who follows your eyes can see where they land. However, Mann marries attractive and intelligent Katia Pringsheim, with whom he will have six children.
He takes risks with his novel “Death in Venice”, the story of an aging composer whose infatuation with a beautiful child has fatal consequences, but at the time of its publication in 1912, Mann's stature is such that few readers notice how self-referential the story is. The magician is a fictional life of Thomas Mann, whose books I like, and Mann had a tumultuous life like many who had to flee Nazi Germany, so on a superficial level the novel makes an interesting read, although not as attractive as I expected. He says that the first book in the series, The Magicians, started when he was 35, the same year he had a son and got divorced and started seeing a therapist. There are already several biographies of Mann (the thanks of Tóibín list those that were useful to him) and The Magician is not an academic text.
So it only makes sense that you think of your Magicians trilogy of books, which will culminate in Tuesday's release of The Magician's Land, as highly autobiographical even though nothing ever happened to me in them. With more than 500 pages, “The Magician is the size of a man, but not only stands out for the strength of Tóibín's elegant prose, but also because the reader can barely expect the next bon mot from a family member or guest. Most of The Magician is about Mann's marriage to Katia Pringsheim and the six children they had together. In this context, the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín has managed to write “The Magician”, an incisive and ingenious novel that shows the good company that could have been the nobleman and his family.
The land of the magician does not close the door to future books in the series, but Grossman does say that it goes beyond Quentin's world. Instead, The Wizard wanders from Mann's childhood in Lübeck, the port city immortalized in his first novel, Buddenbrooks, to the United States, and back to Europe. Perhaps Nora and the others based on people she knew are more impressive because she knew them intimately, unlike Mann, whom she presumably came to know through his writings and biographies of him, a step further, in other words. He is one of the few Germans who managed to continue writing in exile, and The Magician offers a glimpse of what that meant.
With this in mind, I expected The Magician to focus on Mann writing Venice (you can't judge a book this way, but the jacket implies it too). I was going to read this book because when I grew up in Germany I read most of Mann's works and I absolutely loved each one of them (by heart I didn't find them particularly heavy) and I loved most of Coibin's books, although I never read The Author because I'm not a Henry James fan, and I read Nora Webster in the present I think it's a bit boring, but after your review, and because it's based on your substantial knowledge of Mann, I'm not going to bother now. The magician begins with a teenage Mann and his brothers, in the family's manor house, waiting for his mother, Julia, to come out for a party. Without realizing it at first, he says, he also put a lot of himself into the angry outsider Julia, co-star of The Magician King.
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