The Magician

Reviews

“A sweeping biographical portrait of Nobel-winning German novelist Thomas Mann, nicknamed the Magician by his fascinating children. Tóibín masterfully explores the tension between the admired public figure and his timorous private self. . . . Wholly immersive.”
—Toronto Star

“An enormously ambitious book, one in which the intimate and the momentous are exquisitely balanced. . . . Tóibín has fashioned an epic.”
—The Guardian (UK)

 “Extensively researched and lyrically wrought. . . . 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

“An incisive and witty novel. . . . The Magician is Mann-sized, but it canters along not only on the strength of Tóibín’s graceful prose, but also because the reader can hardly wait for the next bon mot from a family member or guest.”
—Washington Post

“It’s hard not to talk about Colm Tóibín’s latest novel . . . in the loftiest of terms, as something staggering, or dazzling, or an achievement. Yet given the epic sweep of the book . . . these accolades feel deserving. . . . If you’re willing to give yourself over to the vast and stunningly realized world that Tóibín conjures around Mann, you’ll find yourself savoring every page.”
—Vogue

“This deeply researched, highly accomplished fictional narrative . . . makes for compelling reading.”
—BookPage

“The Magician is a marvel, and so is Colm Tóibín.”
—Literary Hub

“Marvelously executed and absorbing. . . . Colm Toíbín’s intelligence is great as his knowledge of literature and his empathetic imagination. He’s a magician too, a conjuror, but he reconstructs ghosts rather than banishes them.”
—Book Post

“Employing luxurious prose that quietly evokes the tortured soul behind these literary masterpieces, Tóibín has an unequalled gift for mapping the interior of genius. In Mann, Toibin finds the ideal muse, one whose interior is so rich and vast that only a similar genius could hope to capture it.”
—Booklist

“Can a novel about historical figures make them visible in ways that a biography cannot? Colm Tóibín is hardly the first novelist to explore this question, but he is one of the more powerful, and perhaps the most determined.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Gripping. . . . [Told with] a thriller-like intensity.”
—Seattle Times

“Little by little the inexorably accumulating details make Tóibín’s Mann more interesting than the mere facts of his admittedly larger-than-life story. . . . The book gets its momentum and heft from the way these experiences intersect with the larger world, in particular, the way Tóibín has Mann making sense of them, in his life and in his art.”
—Star Tribune

“Mann’s was a cinematic life. . . But The Magician . . . resists the shallow gestures of Hollywood biopics, reaching for something mainstream film couldn’t get at, or wouldn’t bother with. How does an artist create, and can a true artist live as the rest of us do?”
—Vulture

“No living novelist dramatizes artistic creation as profoundly, as luminously, as Colm Tóibín, or conveys so well the entanglement of imagination and desire.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

“A remarkable achievement.”
—John Banville, author of April in Spain and the Booker Prize-winning The Sea

“A fictional account of the life of Thomas Mann which is frighteningly relevant now as we see fascism make an impossible return. . . . a vast, original, emotionally complex novel.”
—Peter Carey, author of A Long Way from Home

“As with everything Colm Tóibín sets his masterful hand to, The Magician is a great imaginative achievement—immensely readable, erudite, worldly and knowing, and fully realized.”
—Richard Ford, author of Sorry for Your Trouble

“[A] work of huge imaginative sympathy. . . . quite thrilling. . . . It takes a writer of Toibin’s caliber to understand how the seemingly inconsequential details of life can be transmogrified, turned into art . . . [The novel’s] expansive and subtle rhythms carry the reader forward and backward in time, tracing an epic story of exile and literary grandeur, unpacking a major author’s psyche in such a way that the life of the imagination becomes, finally, the real and only tale worth telling.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Part of the pleasure of reading The Magician is seeing how one great writer, Colm Tóibín, imagines the life and work of another great writer, Thomas Mann, in prose as beautiful and vibrant as the older writer deserves. . . . Tóibín presents a rare view into the making of serious art and, in the process, shows he is a powerful magician himself.”
—Chicago Review of Books

“Maximalist in scope but intimate in feeling, The Magician never feels dutiful. Like its subject, it’s somber, yet it’s also prickly and strange, sometimes all at once.”
—New York Times

“Tóibín has surpassed himself.”
—Publishers Weekly Expand reviews