The magician a novel
"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 homose...
| Main Author: | Tóibín, Colm, 1955- (Author) |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Scribner,
2021.
|
| Edition: | First Scribner hardcover edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: |
"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. His oldest daughter and son share lovers. They are leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement. This stunning combination of German propriety and Bohemian revolution goes hand in hand for decades. We see the rise of Hitler, the forced exile of a swath of German writers and artists, Mann's narrow escape to America, his sojourn at Princeton, along with fellow exile Einstein, and his final move to LA in the late 40s where he presided over an astonishing community of writers, artists and musicians, including Brecht and Shoenberg, even as his children court tragedy. To call this a portrait of an artist is both reductive and true-it is a novel about a character and a family, fiercely engaged by the world, profoundly flawed, and as flamboyant as it's possible to be"-- |
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| Physical Description: |
500 pages ; 24 cm |
| ISBN: |
9781476785080 1476785082 9781476785097 1476785090 |
| Author Notes: |
In 1978 he returned to Dublin and began working on an M.A. in Modern English and American Literature. He wrote for In Dublin, Hibernia, and The Sunday Tribune. He became the Features Editor of In Dublin in 1981, and then a year later accepted the position of Editor for the Irish current affairs magazine Magill. His first book, Walking Along the Border, was published in 1987 and his first novel, The South, was published in 1990. He wrote for The Sunday Independent as a drama or television critic and political commentator. He writes regularly for The London Review of Books. He has written several other novels including The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary, and Nora Webster. The Heather Blazing received the 1993 Encore Award and The Master received the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. He was short listed for the 2015 Folio Prize for his title Nora Webster. (Bowker Author Biography) |