To read a new novel by Colm Toibin is always a pleasure, (thank you PRH for the galley) I love his exquisite writing and story-telling. Add the subject of Thomas Mann to his upcoming novel, to publish in September, and you know you are in for a real treat. I have to confess I have a hard time reading Thomas Mann's novel although he is one of Germany’s literary greats and a Nobel laureate to top it off. "Buddenbrooks" is still one of the most well-known German classics.
However his very dysfunctional family history and his biography provide fascinating material for several novels. “The Magician”, as Mann was called by his family members, was an absolute delight to read, loved it.

Colm Toibin’s biographical novel follows Thomas Mann’s actual life very closely; his homosexual tendencies and fantasies which he most probably never acted upon provided him with material for his novels. His sexual preference did not keep him from marrying Katia Pringsheim who came from a very wealthy, cultured Jewish family in Munich, he had six children with her. They were one of Germany’s most fascinating literary families with Erika, Klaus and Golo Mann their most prominent, outspoken children but all six lived lives which were overshadowed by their absent, famous father. As a couple Katia and Thomas remained devoted to each other until his death. The rise of the Nazis forced them into exile several times, first Switzerland, later France and eventually the US where they settled and were given citizenship and then back again to Switzerland.

The novel is not only a captivating story of their family with Katia the absolute ruling matriarch but also an excellent synopsis of world and German politics during their life time which greatly affected their lives. The novel centers around Thomas Mann and Colm Toibin’s imaginative dialogues and thoughts are probably very close to what actually happend..

“The magician” is definitely one of my favorite literary reads of the year.

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 [book:Doctor Faustus|34444]) 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: [book:Death in Venice|53061], [book:The Magic Mountain|88077]) are far more complex, weaving in philosophical discussions and ideological debate as well as a sophisticated use of symbolism and figurative writing.

After an interesting start (I never knew Mann's mother was Brazilian) this book seems to just skim the surface: one minute Thomas is a young man forced into working for an insurance company, the next he's written [book:Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family|80890], is a world-famous author and has won a Nobel prize ('I won the Nobel Prize in Literature,' Thomas said, 'I know what language Dante wrote in') - there's little sense of time passing though we're told it has ('the birth of Thomas's second child was followed three years later by the arrival of Golo') and hardly any significant insight into Mann's intellectual and psychological interests that are so manifest in his writing.

There's some homoerotic angst in the early chapters, and some very coy writing about sex where it's completely unclear what's happening, and no real insight into what Mann is feeling - then he decides to marry a woman, and we don't really know why or even know what happens on their wedding night: the book has them lying with Katia's nipples pressed into Thomas' chest... and then it's the next day. I don't mean to sound prurient here but what I'm trying to convey is that there's no sense of interiority about Mann as created in this book.

Even the political background is merely sketched in as WW1 is over and done with in a chapter, and the rise of Hitler is an external problem despite Mann having married into a Jewish family: 'Thomas began to lose hope that the regime might fall in Germany. The Nazis, he realised, were not like the poets of the Munich Revolution'. Instead, the character thinks 'it might be best to do nothing'.

It's clear from the afterword that Toibin has read a lot about Mann but somehow there's no sense of personality, of intellect or of feeling that inhabits the space demarked as 'Thomas Mann' in the novel - an avatar goes through the motions of Mann's life almost like a series of tick-boxes, but none of it feels lived. And the character of Mann presented here just doesn't track with the writer who so magisterially analysed ideologies and the soul of a 'sick' Europe in [book:The Magic Mountain|88077], a book which is also alight with a dynamic irony and a sense of humour, something never conveyed here. Perhaps the pressure to articulate the whole of a complex life that stretched from 1875-1955 was just too much. This is a book I was looking forward to hugely but after crawling through to 50% and finding it dry, 'told' and wooden, I'm abandoning it.

Apologies, Penguin - and thanks for the ARC anyway.

This is the story of Thomas Mann’s life. I have not read anything Mann wrote and, heading into this book, I had nothing more than a kind of Wikipedia summary level knowledge of his life. But he lived through a tumultuous period in history, especially German history, that included both World Wars.

I have to confess that despite this book being about a world famous author living through a fascinating period of history, I did not find much in it that drew me in. I think this is largely because of the writing style and I appreciate that this is a personal thing. There are many people who love Colm Tóibín’s writing and those people will almost certainly love this book (the initial reviews on Goodreads are predominantly positive), but for me the writing is too monotone. What I mean is that whatever happens to Mann, however intense or dramatic his life or the surrounding events, the writing continues at the same unvarying level. My suspicion is that this is a very deliberate choice by the author who describes Mann’s writing at one point as “ponderous, ceremonious, civilized” and seems to want to imitate that tone in this book. I do acknowledge that I am speaking from a place of ignorance because I have not read Mann, but I am searching for a reason the narrative has the chosen style.

It’s not 100% true to say the writing is monotone through the book. The period during the years of World War II was, for me, far more engaging and whenever Tóibín writes about music the writing seems to come to life. I enjoyed these sections of the book. There’s a passage in which Mann is listening to music in his house and musing on shadow versions of himself and that was by far my favourite passage in the whole book.

Rounding up to three stars


This is an authour I usually enjoy.
Not so much this time.
It was over long and slow paced to begin with,making it a struggle to get into.


I didnt know Thomas Mann at all,so this at least has brought him to my knowledge.
There was some excellent stuff in here too....just it got bogged down a bit.

The Magician is a fictional biography of the German author Thomas Mann.
An interesting read about the author and his life.
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin UK my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book is a well executed, comprehensive novelistic biography of the famous German author Thomas Mann but one which I found engaged my interest but not my emotions or literary sensibilities.

This book was I suspect years in the conception (Colm Toibin wrote a detailed article on the Mann family – in particular his two oldest children Klaus and Erika - for the London Review of Books in 2008 – the article like so many LRB articles ostensibly a review of another author’s non-fiction book but instead a platform for the article’s author to include their own researches and ideas into the same topic). The acknowledgements to this novel also make it clear that the book has been meticulously researched.

Overall I found it a very interesting and largely engrossing account which despite its length I read over a 24 hour period (I actually found that the best way to keep track of the many characters).

I do not really know Thomas Mann at all or his stories (beyond a few of their titles and a very high level summary of them) and it was certainly interesting to read of his life – particularly the way that he bridged a tumultuous period in Germany’s history (from pre World War I, through the Munich revolution to the rise of the Nazis, through World War II and into the partition of the coutntry) and yet one also of huge artistic progression in Germany and Austria across literature, opera and music – with many famous artists featuring in the book (not least Mann’s own extended family).

Mann himself did not come across that well in the novel to me – for all his literary brilliance always rather playing catch up with the world and seemingly taken by surprise by the dramatic and often terrible developments in Germany (one has the sense that his own rather privileged lifestyle as well as self-absorption in his own writing lead to a permanently unfulfilled belief in the triumph of reason and rationality and convention) – but this was nevertheless interesting.

I felt though always that I was effectively reading a non-fiction account in fictional clothing.

Now this approach removed much of what can make conventional non-fictional biographies both tedious (the lengthy footnotes and references, the constant setting out of the contrary views of previous biographers with the author’s own conclusions and occasional score-settling) and rather infuriating (the attempts to speculate on what the subject may have been feeling or may have experienced).

But what it failed to do, at least for me, was to really add sufficiently to the biographical form. Due to my limited knowledge of Thomas Mann I found myself using Wikipedia extensively in the early stages of the novel – just to get my bearings. And what I found was that very little in the novel seemed to be imagined – time and time again anecdotes set out (some of which I had assumed to be at least partly imaginary or created – typically say incidents in Mann’s life which inspired some of the more famous scenes or characters in his books or some of the relationships of the extended Mann family) were readily available on the internet as widely accepted factual detail. What I missed was the literary imagination of say an Ali Smith and her Seasonal Quartet (or say Jean Jean Frémon in “Now, Now Louison”) in allowing a real encounter with an artist and their work.