Book Club: The Magician

About the Book

A New York Times Notable Book, Critic’s Top Pick, and Top Ten Book of Historical Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg Businessweek

From one of today’s most brilliant and beloved novelists, a dazzling, epic family saga set across a half-century spanning World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War that is “a feat of literary sorcery in its own right” (Oprah Daily).

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).

(Description and quotes taken from description of book on Amazon).

About the Author

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; 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. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York. (Description: Simon and Schuster).

About Our Guest

The author of several books on Kafka (Kafka's Clothes, Reading Kafka), and the editor and translator of contemporary Austrian writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Prof. Mark Anderson specializes in German modernism, contemporary Austrian literature and the theory and practice of translation.

He regularly offers courses on modern German-Jewish culture from 1750 to the present, on opera and the idea of music in German culture, and on German exile during the Nazi period. In comparative literature he has taught courses on "Problems of the Gothic," "The Materiality of the Book in Western Culture," and "Jewish Identity in Modern European Culture."

The founder and first director of the Berlin Consortium for German Studies, Prof. Anderson advises students who wish to study in Germany with the Columbia program.

Where to Purchase the Book:

Colm Tólbín is a popular author, and The Magician can be found in most library systems and bookstores. It can be ordered online via Amazon or directly from the publisher, as well as many other online book vendors.

Learn More:

New York Times Review

Vulture Review