This book is the closest I have ever got to Thomas Mann. Despite considering The Buddenbrooks as my top ever reads, I never ventured to read any of his other novels. Likewise, I was not interested in his life, being of the opinion that the general information I know would suffice. And probably nothing would have changed had Mr Toibin not written this book. Colm Toibin's literary representation of Thomas Mann, his family life and writing was a fascinating opportunity for me to learn a lot about h...

This story begins in Lübeck, Germany in the year 1891, when the population was around 64,000 people, the year before Sacred Heart Church was consecrated, and two years before the Museum am Dom was built. The world was expanding in population and ideologies, and Germany was, as well. This begins with Thomas Mann as a young boy on a night his parents were entertaining friends in their home, as Thomas, his older brother Heinrich and sisters Lula and Carla looked over the event from the first landi...

I'm sorry to say that I didn't get on with this book at all. From the opening page when we hear of an 'August Leverkuhn' it seems clear that the book is going to interpret Mann's life as the source of his literary works (Adrian Leverkuhn is the protagonist of Mann's Doctor Faustus) a stance which, I feel, does a disservice to the imagination and reduces literature to a kind of heightened life, rather than art. That's especially the case with Mann whose books (at least the ones I've read: Death i...

To be, or not to be…Well, I procrastinated à la Hamlet about writing a review of The Magician for days and days but eventually decided the nobler course was not to: why should I stick my reviewer's bodkin into the heart of an innocent book just because it didn't happen to please me. Let this book face the slings and arrows of goodreads fortune unhampered by my review words—and may it encounter laurel wreaths rather than arrows before it shuffles off the goodreads updates coil.In any case, I've a...

A masterpiece. Too many quotes, too many thoughts to share,... need time to find the words that can do justice to this magnificent fictionalized biography and its amazing writer. A book of the year.I finally got around to write my review. Here it is.Stylistically flawless and impeccably paced, this fictional biography of Thomas Mann is neither judgmental nor hagiographic, but admirably immersive into its subject, showing many years of extensive research and written with penetrating insights into...

The Magician tells the life story of Thomas Mann, an early-to-mid 20th century German writer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel The Magic Mountain, and who was later revealed to be gay (or at least bisexual), following the unsealing of his diaries in the late 1990s, several decades after his death. Colm Toibin (himself a gay novelist, which might have informed/drawn him to this project?) has clearly done his research for this novel, and covers the periods of Mann’s major works...

The Magician by Colm TóibínI have never read anything by Thomas Mann but thought I knew something about him. Once I started reading this historical novel and also looking at other information about him, I realized I had known nothing about him except that he wrote Death in Venice. The Magician is well research and informative but may have told me, in a very dry manner, more about Thomas Mann than I would have liked to know. In real life, hiding so much of himself, his feelings, and his inclinati...

Now rather underwhelmingly the winner of the 2022 Folio Prize - against a longlist which featured Natasha Brown’s Aseembly and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These which in much less than a fifth of the length of this novel seems to achieve so, so much more. This book is a well executed, comprehensive novelistic biography of the famous German author Thomas Mann but one which I found engaged my interest far more than my emotions or literary sensibilities.This book was I suspect years in the co...

Thomas Mann, acclaimed author of Death in Venice and many other books and novellas, is the focus of this book where fiction and nonfiction blend. This book begins with Thomas as a child growing up in a provincial German city. His father was conservative, and his mother was an alluring Brazilian woman. From an early age, he wanted to write. He was creative and artistic but that did not go over well with his father. He had to hide his writing and his sexuality. He eventually married Katia Pringshe...

This beautifully written book is a fictionalized biography of Thomas Mann, the German author. It begins with Thomas as a school boy in Lubeck, son of a prominent family who will become even more well known when he publishes his first novel, Buddenbrooks, at the young age of 23. Encompassing most of his life, the Magician spans the years from 1891 to the early 1950s. Mann’s life and work had as its base the major events of those decades: World War I; the defeat of Germany accompanied by political...

Colm Toibin brilliantly wrote The Magician which blended fact with fiction. It was an intimate exploration of the life of the intriguing and talented German author, Thomas Mann, best know for his literary contributions of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain. Mann was the recipient of The Nobel Prize. Toibin traced Thomas Mann’s life beginning in 1891 and followed it through both World Wars, the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, as he escaped to America and finally came full circle when he made hi...

This is a novel about Thomas Mann out of whose extensive work I’ve only read one book - Death in Venice. It begins in Lübeck in 1891 where we witness young Thomas and his family especially the impact of his Brazilian born mother Julia on the serious and rather judgemental folk of the provincial city. This part is done very vividly and I rather like the wayward Julia! Thomas is a dreamy child, he has to pretend to interest in the family business which eldest brother Heinrich (also a writer) sees

There will be a few stops on my route to the last page.⭕️ STOP 4, TERMINAL 100% January 29th, 2022Finis coronat opus. Finally, I have some good news to report. The Magician got significantly better towards the end. The passages on music truly appealed to me. Moreover, one more wish has been granted: Katia came out of the shadow and her personality is not bland anymore in the finale. She even appeared in the last sentence of the novel.The thing I have not mentioned so far which has been irking...

An extraordinary book about the life of Thomas Mann. As far as I can gather it's well researched and I learned a lot. I looked at photos on the internet to support what I was reading which helped to visualise. I must say I find Colm Toibin a little long-winded at times. I found some parts difficult to get through while I flew through others.

The last pages here make this a powerful book: The Nobel-winning (1929) Thomas Mann left Germany because of his outspoken defiance of Hitler and settled in southern California. Then, the post-war authoritarian climate in Washington, D.C., forced him to pack up yet again in 1952 and move back to Europe, this time Switzerland, his last stop on the precarious refugee road. Mann hoped to spend his final years in Pacific Palisades, Ca., home to a large emigre colony. He learned that many in Germany w...