Colm Toibin

"The Magician opens at the turn of the twentieth century in a provincial German city where the young boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative, conventional father and a Brazilian mother, exotic and unpredictable, who will never fit in. He hides both his artistic aspirations and his homosexual desires from this father, and his sexuality from everyone. He longs for the charismatic, beautiful, rich, cultured young Jewish man, but marries his twin sister. He longs for a boy he sees on a beach in Venice and writes a novel about him. He has six children. He is the most successful novelist of his time. He wins the Nobel Prize and is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler"--

A Novel

The Magician

. . . what the orchestra gave him was only a sense of his own smallness. . . When the concert was over, he did not want to go out into the night. He wanted to remain enfolded by the music.

If he were to be offered a chance to say a final word about the human spirit, he would like to do so comically, he thought; he would dramatize the idea that humans could not ever be trusted, that they could reverse their own story as the wind changed, that their lives were a continuous, enervating and amusing effort to appear plausible. And in that lay, he felt, the pure genius of humanity, and all the pathos.

Maybe there were other stories that he would remember, long-forgotten ones that he had heard in the company of the others who had also lived in this house, and who now had moved out of time towards a realm whose boundaries were still unclear to him.

The Magician quotes

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