How could I have read The Magician three times

and yet feel flummoxed about what to write this Sunday afternoon?  This novel by Colm Tóibín reveals the life of Thomas Mann in 498 pages. Multiply this by three and it means I read 1464 pages this past month. But each time …I felt even more engulfed in the story of this famous German writer, who won the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature. Thomas Mann fled Nazi Germany and established a life in the United States with his wife Katia, mother to his six children. All six adults flow in and out of the life of their parents in Princeton and then in Southern California.

Chapter 1 takes place in Lübeck, 1891,

and 18, the final chapter, in 1950, Los Angeles. Yet this is misleading because the novel ends with Mann’s 80^th birthday in Switzerland and an earlier return to Lübeck for a celebration in his honor.  A WSJ critic wrote, “One of the most sublime endings I’ve come across…in a long time.”  Anyone who loves Bach and the composer Buxtehude will agree with this reviewer.

Given I am wordless right now, I read all four plus pages of testimonies for The Magician in my hefty 8 by 5 paperback. One blurb by Jay Parini in the New York Times Book Review interested me. I’d taken a class from Parini years ago at the Bread Loaf in Vermont. He discussed Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” and I appreciated how he approached the story. Parini says, “It takes a writer of Tóibín’s caliber to understand how the seemingly inconsequential details of life can be… turned into art.” Parini also notes the novel’s expansive and subtle rhythms that carry the reader forward and backward in time.  I read this description and thought, oh yes. In each read of The Magician, Tóibín’s prose swept me into and through the novel. I had the feeling of being a voyeur, which I do not feel in biography or historical accounts of famous persons. Tóibín’s prose is in contrast to what Mann’s would have been in German, with its complex grammar and sentences that reflect this complexity. The novel’s surface is simple and yet it offers depth in artful ways.

For weeks I feel as if I’ve been with Thomas and his family. I could have lost myself in the Internet! And I watched DVDs of his famous novels: Buddenbrooks, Magic Mountain, Dr. Faustus. I rewatched Visconti’s Death in Venice, plus heard and watched Bemjamin Britten’s opera of this novella.

This film, available on Amazon, was a captivating visual and musical experience. I listened to a lecture on Golo Mann (the third of six children), as delivered by a German scholar. As I read the subtitles. I took notes. Earlier I listened to a You Tube with Colm Tobin discussing The Magician. I have printed pages of articles and already had a folder of articles I’d collected over the years.  I’m awash in Thomas Mann!  But he seems beyond relevant in our increasingly Fascist times.

 Next week: What the RCC-RILL book club had to say about The Magician and Death in Venice.