It's a long time since I read anything by Thomas Mann but Colm Tóibín's 'The Magician' made me want to read some again, which is probably as good an indicator of its quality as you could wish for. It's a big book appropriately, if not as big as some of its subject's, which focuses more on Mann the man (as it were) and his family than his writing, although we're aware of his morning writing routine throughout. It's also a history of the transition from 19th to 20th century and of the rise of fascism, a careful portrait of a dysfunctional family, and, in part, a queer revisionist imagining of the writer's life - of the reluctant German and the reluctant gay Mann. Despite his doubts and uncertainties, Mann comes out of it all pretty well (he's also surprisingly funny at times), if not quite as well as his wife, Katia, and rather better than most of his siblings and children. Well worth your time.

This was my first time reading a book from the author but I am delighted to say I thoroughly enjoyed the story and I look forward to reading more books from the writer in the future

This is a novel based on the life of Thomas Mann and his family.. It describes all the contraditions in Manns life, one of which was 6 children despite being homosexual. Much of the book I enjoyed but some passages did not entirely grip me.

Wonderfully evocative, Toibin weaves his usual magic with words and prose to show an interesting perspective on Thomas Mann.

The Magician, written by Colm Toibin, successfully mixed reality and fantasy. It was a personal look into the life of the interesting and creative German novelist Thomas Mann, well known for his works Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.

I must be honest, before reading Colm Toibin's thoroughly researched fictionalised story about Thomas Mann, all I knew about the writer was that he wrote Death In Venice and that he was a closeted gay man. This book was incredible, I particularly enjoyed the second half of the book, that dealt with Thomas Mann's time in Switzerland, France and the States. I learned so much about him, and also about Germany both before an after the Second World War. Highly recommended.

Sorry for the delay in reviewing this gripping and heart breaking book, new author to me but what a well put together story, Imagine how people had to be someone else to be themselves in secret. Recommended.

This was a riveting imagining of the life of Thomas Mann that didn't fall into any of the cliches and tropes surrounding his homosexuality. What you get is the full-drawn character: the family man, the man with homo-erotic fantasies, the devoted father, and of course the towering intellect. His family are endlessly entertaining, "ultramodern" for their time. And the writer's skirmishes with Nazi Germany and the journey the family took to escape its tyranny were spellbinding. I simply adored this book and would highly recommend

A fascinating insight into the life of Thomas Mann and the history of Germany and the people who had to
Leave.
Brilliantly written as ever by colm toibin

While I prefer Colm Toibin’s non-fiction to fiction, The Magician is a good read. Solid more than inspired, it adopts a brick-by-brick approach to Thomas Mann’s life with a running internal analysis.

Colm Tóibín's exquisite novel set in Germany at the start of the twentieth century, focuses on the incredibly famed author, Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929, as the protagonist. The novel starts with a young Mann, who is besotted by one of the most wealthy and respected families in Munich, eventually marrying their daughter Katia and raising a family of six kids who refer to him as 'The Magician'.

He has artistic aspirations and homosexual desires, that he hides from everyone. In this book, Tóibín brings to life the real, private life of Mann, his desire for men and boys and perhaps the parts that might shock us and look at the author in a very different light. His son and daughter also had polyamorous lives, sharing partners. A revelatory novel ,  showing the conflict between a man with incredible artistic talents and tense, forbidden sexual desires.

Mann continued to write his novels in the backdrop of war breaking out, fleeing to Switzerland, France and then New Jersey and Los Angeles. Tóibín captures this history, beautifully leveraging both impeccable research and imagination.

The Magician is a fictionalised account of the life of the German Nobel author Thomas Mann. Though I have never read anything by Mann I knew he was a complex character who lived through a tumultuous period in history. So i had high expectations for this book. Sadly they were misplaced for this turned out to be a deathly dull book.

How could an author, faced with such rich material, turn in something so lacking in emotion and atmosphere? I don’t know why Tóibín didn’t opt to write a straight biography because so much of what I read just seemed to follow a pattern of ‘this happened – and then this happened.’ I was missing the spark of imagination and creativity.

It was so dull that I decided I’d had enough, and not even the fact it was our book club choice could persuade me otherwise. Having enjoyed two previous novels by Tóibin, this was such a let down. I’m now hesitant to read the copy of The Master which I’ve owned since about 2006 because that too is about a literary great — Henry James — so I fear could be much the same.

I was unable to read this completely on the app, and unfortunately lost the rest of the book to archiving! But what I read was evocative, entirely immersive, and I’m hoping to read the print book soon to make up for it! I have always wanted to read Toibin’s work, and this was a pleasure.

Thank you so much NetGalley and Penguin for the privilege !

I must confess tht I did not now that Thomas Mann was a real person until later on in the novel. This is less novel and more biography as he was a real person. There were parts of the novel that were very interesting and other parts that I did skim over. It was a difficult read at times but the author's books are not what I would consider to be an easy read. It has made me interested to read some of Thomas Mann's novels in the future.

Did I read right through to the end? Yes, it drove me forward in that way. I knew something of the life and knew the writings, but this gave depth to both. While the book did float inside the repressed sexuality of Mann, I felt it was strangely obedient to the biography. It would have been good to find something of Mann the novelist evoked ... scenes were rushed thrugh rather than embellished, and scope for the novelists' imagination to give us more than the facts was missed. Still, it proved a good telling.

The pacing of this book was quite slow. Though it was meant to be a fictionalised biography of Thomas Mann’s life, at times it felt too biographical. The book was felt more of a historical account than a novel, causing it to lose any emotion.

Thomas Mann, a man of contradictions, his fiction writing magnificent but there was a lot more. Here Toibin writes a fictionalised biography of a real writer and manages to make his story that of the 20th century as well. Toibin is a wonderful writer and his prose is fluent and imaginative, he captures the essence of a man of contrasts.

This is a long, and, for me, slow read. And that was a good thing. I was immersed in the world of late 19th and early 20th century Germany, seen from the perspective of the writer Thomas Mann. Colm Tóibin has written a wholly believable fictionalised biography of the writer, and by so doing, gives an insight into the German experience of the rise of the Nazis and the conflict of loving a country (its landscape and literature)and hating a regime and the people’s response to it, Thomas Mann’s family is fascinating - varied in their political views and perspectives. As always, Tóibin’s writing is beautiful and describes the complexities of family life brilliantly - the rancour, jealousy, the unhappiness as well as the love.

Based on the life of Thomas Mann, a famous German writer. He comes from a dysfunctional family, begets a dysfunctional family, and seems to live at a distance from everyone. The only thing that piques his interest seem to be young men, however only at a distance. The book covers his life before the war in Germany, his escape to America and then returns to Europe. It all seems to be very long and ponderous

I would struggle to be able to review this book due to issues with the file/download. The issues stopped the flow of the book. The issues are:
- Missing words in the middle of sentences
- Stop/start sentences on different lines
- No clear definition of chapters.

Not sure if it was a file/download issue but there were lots of gaps, stop/starts which really ruined the flow. I would love the chance to read a better version as the description of the book appeals to me.