From one of today's most brilliant and beloved novelists, a dazzling, epic family saga set across a half-century spanning World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War.
Colm Tóibín's magnificent new novel opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.
In a stunning marriage of research and imagination, Tóibín explores the heart and mind of a writer whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire. The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived - the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile. This is a man and a family fiercely engaged by the world, profoundly flawed, and unforgettable. As People magazine said about The Master, "It's a delicate, mysterious process, this act of creation, fraught with psychological tension, and Tóibín captures it beautifully."
"Tóibín's novels typically depict an unfinished battle between those who know what they feel and those who don't, between those who have found a taut peace within themselves and those who remain unsettled. His prose relies on economical gestures and moments of listening, and is largely shorn of metaphor and explanation." - D. T. Max, The New Yorker
"In The Magician, Toibin delves into the layers of the great German novelist's unconscious, inviting us to understand his fraught, monumental, complicated and productive life. It's a work of huge imaginative sympathy...quite thrilling...It takes a writer of Toibin's caliber to understand how the seemingly inconsequential details of life can be transmogrified, turned into art...[the novel's] expansive and subtle rhythms carry the reader forward and backward in time, tracing an epic story of exile and literary grandeur, unpacking a major author's psyche in such a way that the life of the imagination becomes, finally, the real and only tale worth telling." -Jay Parini, The New York Times Book Review
"Mr. Tóibín wields a dramatically stripped-down prose style, one that emphasizes silence and stillness as much as dialogue and action. Its effect is cumulative, and its epiphanies, when they come, are all the more powerful after so much restraint... What Mr. Tóibín's exquisitely sensitive novel gets right, in a way that biography rarely does, is its acknowledgment of unknowability. Mann was a towering public figure of a kind that seems inconceivable for a writer today...But he was also an infinitely elliptical, elusive, ironic person whose masks only disguised other masks, and he poured those complexities--sexual, emotional, intellectual--into his daily writing sessions in the various home libraries of all his provisional houses in all the stations of his exile... one of the most sublime endings I've come across in a novel in a long time." - Donna Rifkin, The Wall Street Journal
"An incisive and witty novel that shows what good company the Nobelist and his family might have been... Tóibín seems determined to give the children their due, something their father never managed to do...Klaus, his sister Erika and their four siblings come vividly alive... Another riveting presence is Agnes Meyer, wife of Eugene Meyer, who published The Washington Post during the 1930s and '40s...THE MAGICIAN is Mann-sized, but it canters along not only on the strength of Tóibín's graceful prose, but also because the reader can hardly wait for the next bon mot from a family member or guest." - Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post
"Mann's was a cinematic life -- his politics alone made him an exile twice over (in Los Angeles, fleeing the Nazis, then in Switzerland, fleeing McCarthy). But The Magician, Colm Tóibín's new novel about Mann, resists the shallow gestures of Hollywood biopics, reaching for something mainstream film couldn't get at, or wouldn't bother with. How does an artist create, and can a true artist live as the rest of us do?" - Rumaan Alam, Vulture
"An ode to a 20th-century genius and a feat of literary sorcery in its own right." - O Magazine
"Extensively researched and lyrically wrought...a complex but empathetic portrayal of a writer in a lifelong battle against his innermost desires, his family and the tumultuous times they endure." - Time
"Tóibín's Mann [is] more interesting than the mere facts of his admittedly larger-than-life story... events conspire to invest this life with much of the drama of the 20th century's most pressing social, cultural and political questions... the book gets its momentum and heft from the way these experiences intersect with the larger world, in particular, the way Tóibín has Mann making sense of them, in his life and in his art." - Ellen Atkins, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Powerful... The Magician masterfully weaves together Tóibín's take on Mann's personal and interior life with the creation of his major works... a remarkable dual portrait of Germany's history in the 20th century and of a great, internationally famous writer... a stirring paean to literature and music... Tóibín does a particularly sensitive job depicting the Manns' long, successful marriage... a magnificent achievement." - Heller McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor
"Gripping.... A retelling... of Mann's turbulent life....[told with] a thriller-like intensity." - Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times
"The Magician recaptures a literary giant... Symphonic and moving... Maximalist in scope but intimate in feeling." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Having already fictionalized four years of Henry James's life in 2004's The Master, Tóibín, a careful, elegant writer, has turned his sights on Thomas Mann. Something like 60 years are covered in this book as teenage uncertainty makes way for literary superstardom, though the real action takes place between the world wars. Mann, by then a famous author, took a stance against National Socialism (after his children dragged it out of him), which resulted in devastating, foreseeable repercussions for himself, his family, and his writing." - Bloomberg
"It's hard not to talk about Colm Tóibín's latest novel, The Magician, in the loftiest of terms, as something staggering, or dazzling, or an achievement. Yet given the epic sweep of the book--which at once offers a haunting and heartrendingly intimate portrait of its protagonist, the German writer Thomas Mann, and a richly drawn sense of place as it travels through a politically turbulent early-20th-century Europe to America and back again--these accolades feel deserving... If you're willing to give yourself over to the vast and stunningly realized world that Tóibín conjures around Mann, you'll find yourself savoring every page." - Liam Hess, Vogue
"The tenth novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Master and Brooklyn is an intimate portrait of one of the 20th century's most intriguing literary figures: Thomas Mann. As he did with Henry James in 2004's The Master, Tóibin blends the factual with the imagined--following Mann and his complex family through the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and exile--to conjure the rich inner life, and repressed sexuality, of a man 'whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire.'" - LitHub
"This vibrates with the strength of Mann's visions and the sublimity of Tóibín's mellifluous prose. Tóibín has surpassed himself." - Publisher's Weekly
"The personal and public history is compelling ... Tóibín succeeds in conveying his fascination with the Magician, as his children called him, who could make sexual secrets vanish beneath a rich surface life of family and uncommon art. [ The Magician is] an intriguing view of a writer who well deserves another turn on the literary stage." - Kirkus
"As with his triumphant fictional biography of Henry James, The Master (2004), Tóibín once again takes as his subject a literary titan, the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann ... Employing luxurious prose that quietly evokes the tortured soul behind these literary masterpieces, Tóibín has an unequalled gift for mapping the interior of genius. In Mann, Toibin finds the ideal muse, one whose interior is so rich and vast that only a similar genius could hope to capture it." - Booklist
