Despite considering The Buddenbrooks as my top ever reads, I never ventured to read any of his other novels. 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 book is the closest I have ever got to Thomas Mann. And probably nothing would have changed had Mr Toibin not written this book. Likewise, I was not interested in his life, being of the opinion that the general information I know would suffice. This book is the closest I have ever got to Thomas Mann. 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.more He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice.
He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, Colm Tóibín’s 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. Colm Tóibín’s 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.