Saturday on Zenda. Saturday of contemporary classics. Saturday, in this case, about The Magician. The Story of Thomas Mann, one of the Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s most recent novels (born 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford), published in 2021 and recently revived in his catalog, with a Spanish translation by Antonia Martín Martín for the publishing house DeBolsillo. Demonstrating the mastery that defines him, and following in the footsteps of the novelized biography of Henry James that he crafted in the pages of the celebrated The Master, Tóibín here fictionalizes the life of the figure regarded as the great German novelist of the 20th century: Thomas Mann.
La propia editorial apunta, acerca del libro: “
This epic novel chronicles the life of a famous, wary and reserved man whose inner life bore intense contradictions: Thomas Mann
. Born in Lübeck in 1875, Mann grew up concealing his artistic ambitions from his father and his homosexual orientation from the world. He married Katia, the youngest daughter of one of Munich’s wealthiest and most cultured Jewish families, a fascinating woman with whom he had six children. He shifted from defending fervent patriotism during World War I to forging a dark and complex relationship with his homeland when, upon Hitler’s rise to power, he anticipated the horrors of Nazism. Exiled in France, Switzerland and the United States, he fought to keep his family safe and endured the terrible toll of siblings’ and children’s suicides. He wrote some of the finest works of European literature and won the Nobel Prize, but did not want to live again in the country that inspired them
.
Remarkably blending research and imagination, Tóibín captures the deep personal conflict behind a public life and crafts an intimate portrait of the 20th century in “the best of his many truly extraordinary novels” (Sunday Independent).
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Author: Colm Tóibín. Translation: Antonia Martín Martín. Title: The Magician. The Story of Thomas Mann. Publisher: DeBolsillo. Available at: Todos tus libros.