The Magician Author: Colm Toibin [Ireland] Translator: Pai Li Shanghai Translation Publishing House Popular Fiction Books of the Week

＊The latest novel by Colm Tóibín, the author of The Master and Brooklyn

＊ Winners of the British Forrio Prize

＊ Selected as one of the top ten historical novels of 2021 by The New York Times

* Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg Businessweek

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Restoring a Thomas Mann full of desires and secrets

A dazzling family epic spanning half a century of turbulent times

Can a true artist live like everyone else?

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◎ Introduction:

The Magician opens in the remote German town of Lübeck at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, where Thomas Mann grows up with a conservative, docile father and a charming, elusive mother from Brazil. Young Mann hides his artistic ambitions from his father and his sexual orientation from everyone else. He is attracted to the wealthiest and most educated Jewish family in Munich, marries the family's daughter Katia, and has six children.

While on vacation in Italy, Mann developed a longing for a boy he met on the beach and wrote the story of Death in Venice. While accompanying Katia in Switzerland for recuperation, he was mesmerized by the atmosphere of the mountains that made it impossible to leave and wrote The Magic Mountain. He became the most successful novelist of his time, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and people repeatedly expected his political stance. He fled Germany and went to Switzerland, France, and then to the United States. His wanderings finally ended in Kirchberg, south of Zurich.

An epic family saga set over half a century, through World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War, Tóibín crafts a complex but sympathetic portrait of a writer who struggles throughout his life with his own inner desires, his family, and the turbulent times they lived through.

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Like all of Colm Tóibín’s great books, The Magician is a tour de force of imagination – readable, profound, worldly, insightful, and well-crafted.

—Richard Ford

The Magician is a masterpiece, and you will be convinced after reading it that Mann himself would agree.

—John Banville

No contemporary novelist has so profoundly and beautifully expressed the creative art of fiction, or the entanglement of imagination and desire as Colm Tóibín… Reading his works is one of the deepest pleasures our literature can offer.

—Garth Greenwell

This is an ambitious work that deftly balances the intimate and crucial parts of Thomas Mann’s life, a story of a man who spent almost all of his adult life at his desk or on after-dinner walks with his wife. It is from this stillness that Tóibín fashions an epic.

——The Guardian

The Magician is not a biography but a work of art, an emotional reflection on a century of change, focusing on a man who tried to find his footing but was staggered by the winds of change.

—The Times

Colm Tóibín is a famous contemporary Irish writer. He was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland in 1955. He graduated from University College Dublin. Since publishing his first novel, South in 1990, Tóibín has published ten novels, two collections of short stories, a collection of poems, and many plays, travelogues, and essays. Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004), and The Confessions of Maria (2012) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Master won the 2006 Dublin International Literature Award and other literary awards. Brooklyn won the 2009 Costa Best Novel Award. The Magician, published in September 2021, is his latest novel. In 2011, the British Observer selected him as one of the "300 Most Important Intellectuals in the UK". In the same year, he won the Irish PEN Literary Award in recognition of his contribution to Irish literature. In 2014, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.