In his new novel, "The Magician," award-winning Irish author Colm Tóibín tells the life of Thomas Mann as a novel. From his childhood in Lübeck to his marriage in Munich, from his opposition to the Nazis to his American exile.
Just as Tóibín described the life of Henry James in "The Master," his new book chronicles the life of the Nobel Prize winner, the brilliant, complex artist whose life unfolds at a time when change and war are shaking Europe. The novel contains fascinating sections about interwar Germany: the inflation, the growing discontent, the chaos, but also the artistic and sexual freedom that Mann's children Erika and Klaus experienced and lived out. We see Thomas and Katia Mann struggling to find their way in a new and strange home, first in Princeton and later in Los Angeles.
"The work of a first-rate novelist artful, moving and very beautiful," The New York Times Book Review wrote of the work. The author will be in conversation with literary scholar and Thomas Mann expert Friedhelm Marx.
Colm Tóibín is one of the most important Irish authors of the present day. He is the author of ten novels, including The Magician, his most recent novel; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. Colm Tóibín is a professor of humanities at Columbia University. Tóibín has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. He lives in Dublin and New York.
Friedhelm Marx is Chair of Modern German Literature at the University of Bamberg. He is co-editor of the Thomas Mann Handbook (Stuttgart 2018) and since 2015 has been spokesman for the jury awarding the Thomas Mann Literature Prize of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Friedhelm Marx has been Vice President of the German Thomas Mann Society since 2006 and is currently a Fellow of the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.