This month we will be reading

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

a fictionalized biography of Thomas Mann written by the great novelist Colm Tobin. From the publisher Simon and Schuster:

“The Magician 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. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.

In this “exquisitely sensitive” (The Wall Street Journal) novel, Tóibín has crafted “a complex but empathetic portrayal of a writer in a lifelong battle against his innermost desires, his family, and the tumultuous times they endure” (Time), and “you’ll find yourself savoring every page” (Vogue).” 

Fiction, 512 pages

We hope you can join us for a discussion of this brilliant novel. 

Future Book Club Reads (for more information see the calendar entry):

August 17: Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Wood. Note: we recommend this 1994 translation, which is considered closer to the original than the 1924 translation by Helen T. Lowe-Porter.

We are planning a day trip to Lübeck in late summer to Lübeck, the provincial German City where Thomas Mann was born and where his first novel Buddenbrooks takes place. Details forthcoming.