Archive for The Magician

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Posted in History, LGBTQ+, Literature with tags , , on November 17, 2023 by telescoper

Continuing my attempt to catch up on a backlog of reading I have now finished The Magician by Colm Tóibín. A couple of years ago I attended a Zoom event featuring the author Colm Tóibín talking about this book, which is a fictionalised account of the life of Thomas Mann. It’s taken me a ridiculous long time to get round to it, but it was worth the wait.

The life of Thomas Mann was colourful, to say the least. Born in the German city of Lübeck in 1875, Mann’s father was a wealthy merchant and his mother was from Brazil. His elder brother Heinrich Mann was also a novelist essayist and playwright of considerable reputation. Despite his barely concealed homosexuality, Thomas Mann married Katia Pringsheim in 1905, his wife seemingly not minding about his sexual orientation. He led a comfortable life until he began to see the signs of the coming descent of Europe into the First World War. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and went into exile from Nazism in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1944. In the post-War McCarthyite era he was made to feel less welcome in the USA for having visited East Germany and consequently under suspicion for communist sympathies. Not wanting to return to Germany, he spent most of the last years of his life in Zurich. He died in 1955 at the age of 80.

In some ways this work is reminiscent of The Dream of the Celt which I reviewed a few weeks ago, in that it’s a fictionalised biography, based partially on material found in diaries and with a theme of (partly) suppressed same-sex desire; several of his six offspring were gay or bisexual too. On the other hand I don’t think it’s accurate to think of this book so much as a biography of Thomas Mann but more of a biography of the late 19th and early 20th Century with Mann as the lens. In fact I finished the book without feeling that I knew very much at all about Thomas Mann’s character and personality. That’s probably deliberate as he seems to have cultivated an air of mystery surrounding himself. We follow Mann and his large family through the events leading up to both World Wars, and the effect these tumultuous times had on his siblings and offspring. His family endured more than its fair share of tragedy, with multiple suicides and other heartbreak.

An interesting aspect is the collection of little character sketches this book gives us of famous people with whom Mann interacted in his life. Mann was himself very famous indeed both in Europe and America. Tóibín gives us (not always flattering) views, through Mann’s eyes of, among many others: Gustav Mahler, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. Incidentally, Auden married Mann’s daughter Erika so she could get British citizenship; the marriage was never consummated.

It’s a beautiful book, written in a style that frequently seems to mimic Mann’s own prose. Juxtaposing the ideas in his novels with the events happening when they were being written, both within his own family and in the wider world, provides fascinating insights. I have only read a couple of Thomas Mann’s books: Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain. Knowing more about his life, I now want to read these again and also read the others.

And so as one book disappears from my reading list, several more appear…

P.S. This is the novel in which the Mann family sits around listening to a gramophone record of In fernem Land sung by Leo Slezak I mentioned a few days ago.

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Thomas Mann the Magician

Posted in Literature with tags , , , on October 9, 2021 by telescoper

This week I had visitors from Cardiff, one of whom runs a bookshop in Penarth, as a consequence of which on Thursday evening I attended a Zoom event featuring acclaimed author Colm Tóibín whose book The Magician is on sale now. It’s a fictionalised account of the live of Thomas Mann. The event was so interesting that today I went to the local bookshop in Maynooth and bought a copy.

The life of Thomas Mann was colourful to say the least. Born in the German city of Lübeck in 1875, Mann’s father was a wealthy merchant and his mother was from Brazil. His elder brother Heinrich Mann was also a novelist essayist and playwright of considerable reputation. Despite his homosexuality, Thomas Mann married Katia Pringsheim in 1905, his wife seemingly not minding about his sexual orientation. He led a comfortable life until he began to see the signs of the coming descent of Europe into the First World War. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and went into exile from Nazism in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1944. He spent the last year’s of his life in Zurich, where he died in 1955.

I haven’t read The Magician yet – I’ll post a review when I have – but the event inspired me to dig out my copy of Mann’s greatest novel, The Magic Mountain. The stamp inside reveals that I bought it in 1987, while I was doing my DPhil at Sussex.

In 1912 – the year Death in Venice was published – Thomas Mann and his wife spent some time in a sanatorium where he got the idea for his greatest novel, The Magic Mountain, though it took him over a decade to finish it. It was finally published in 1924 and in my view it merits a place among the greatest works of 20th Century literature.

I had read Death in Venice before The Magic Mountain and there are definite thematic similarities, illness and death being metaphors for the state of Europe at the time. In The Magic Mountain Hans Castorp goes to a Swiss sanatorium for a three-week stay and ends up spending seven years there on a kind of spiritual journey, his isolation from the rest of the world and the ever-present shadow of death heightening his emotional awareness. When he eventually leaves for “real life” outside the dream-like sanatorium, he heads straight for the Great War with the inevitable consequence.

But trying to summarize The Magic Mountain in terms of a plot is pointless. It’s a novel of atmosphere and internal questioning. I found it hard going but immensely rewarding. I always intended to follow up with Buddenbrooks and the Confessions of Felix Krull, but for some reason I never got around to them. I suppose there’s still time, though.

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