Review of THE MAGICIAN
It might not be magic, but it may inspire you to read Thomas Mann ...
Toibin is a very good writer. He eludes me, nonetheless. The Master about Henry James was a penetrating fictionalized biography that, while providing perspective to the great works of James, left The Ambassadors (to name one) as difficult as ever. Brooklyn was a real novel and worked – though I prefer the film adaptation. His latest work on the famously difficult – in every sense – German writer, Thomas Mann, is another biography disguised as a “novel”. The novel, by the way, is certainly going through a profound deconstruction of sorts. Memoirs are called novels when they are clearly memoirs. The same applies for the distinction between autobiography, biography and historical fiction. I realize the lines have always been blurry, but like an Italian interstate, they have now become utterly obscure. The Magician is a biography with dialogue. It reads as a biography NOT as a novel. You will know much about Mann’s life and family – all told chronologically. You will know even more about his repressed homosexuality. The fact that he wrote through WWI, the Weimar Republic, Hitler, WWII and a shattered post war world, is a relatively distant third. Trotting close behind that laggard, are the vast number of places he called home as he drifted into a permanent state of exile. How he did all this with drivers, servants and an apparent black hole of children related costs also lags far behind in this narrative race. What is not in this narrative race is any real literary discussion of Mann’s books. Cited in most every 20th century great book list and affirmed with a well-deserved Nobel Prize, Mann’s novels are long, difficult and intellectually and evocatively complex and demand some interpretative engagement from the reader. The fact that Toibin does almost none of this left me flabbergasted and frustrated.
Nonetheless, I read the whole thing and enjoyed it. I am now reading Mann’s first classic, Buddenbrooks, and may very well finish all its vast 700-page expanse because of Toibin’s rendering of the writer. The context, both internal and external, is compelling enough in The Magician to keep you going and to ultimately inspire a trip to one of Mann’s many classics (I strongly recommend The Magic Mountain). Maybe by resisting critical interpretation, Toibin leaves the reader free to explore Mann on one’s own terms armed with a fresh context that is the real gift of The Magician. If that was his mission from day one, Toibin most definitely accomplished it. If that, in fact, was his mission …
The Magician
Colm Toibin
2021 498 pages