“The Magician”: the long walk of Thomas Mann

« Le Magicien », de Colm Tóibín. Editions Grasset.

Posted Sep 28, 2022, 4:00 PM

We can consider “The Magician” as one of the best biographical novels dedicated to a writer; as one of the pinnacle of Irish authorship; or quite simply as one of the best books of this literary season. The portrait that Colm Tóibín paints of Thomas Mann (1875-1955) and his entourage is not only a masterpiece of accuracy, precision and sensitivity, but also a striking precipitate of the tumultuous history of Germany. and the West during the first half of the 20the century.

Incredibly documented – Colm Tóibín relied on thirty books to write his tight 600 pages – “The Magician” never gives the impression of being a didactic or scholarly book. It is with finesse that we enter in the footsteps and in the head of Thomas Mann, known as “The Magician”. Colm Tóibín shows the determination of the young man, son of a merchant from Lübeck, to force his destiny and become a writer, when he was destined to become an insurance agent. Without ellipsis, he highlights his homosexuality, which was significant throughout his life and tacitly accepted by those close to him. Finally, it is with a remarkable sense of nuance that he evokes his intellectual and political evolution.

A bearer of a certain idea of ​​Germany, Thomas Mann more or less espoused his warmongering in 1914, before ultimately revealing himself to be liberal and fiercely anti-Nazi. In 1933, he fled Germany. Then he emigrated, joined by his family, to America, where he rubbed shoulders with other famous exiles and frequented relatives of Roosevelt. Some of his children, in particular the explosive duo formed by Erika and Klaus, reproach him for his prudence, but the Nobel Prize for Literature (1929) will assert himself, until the end of these days in Switzerland, as an ardent defender of the democracy.

Fusion Reports

Colm Tóibín does not avoid any of the subjects which annoy and in particular the stormy fusional relations of Thomas and Katia Mann with their six children, until the suicide of Klaus in Cannes in 1949. He is also careful not to inflict on us an exegesis of his work. “The Magician” remains a novel that sticks to the life of its hero. His books are approached from the angle of their gestation: “Death in Venice”, inspired by a stay in the city of the Doges; “The Magic Mountain”, a reflection of the months spent by Katia in a sanatorium in Davos…

Refusing stylistic effects, poetic fabrications, he makes us relive the magical journey of a literary genius, as if we were fellow travelers of Thomas Mann, in search of beauty and humanity. Colm Tóibín is also a magician in his own way.

The magician

Irish novel

by Colm Toibin.

Translated by Anna Gibson.

Grasset editions, 608 pages, 26 euros.

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