Book Review - The Magician by Colm Toibin

 The Magician by Colm Toibin

Sydney: Picador, 2021                 ISBN 9781760984113

I've never read any Colm Toibin* before this book, and as I read I came to the realisation that I have not read any Thomas Mann either, although I thought I had. After finishing this book, I will be sure to read more of both.

Toibin has written a considered fictional life of Mann, focussing particularly on the dynamics of his large extended family, Mann's political views, his confused sexuality and, more broadly, the politics of Twentieth Century Europe and America.

In some ways The Magician is a novel of manners: the first section to do with the middle-class mores of Lubeck, then the cosmopolitanism of  wealthy Munich, then the internationalism of the inter-war period, of the politics of exile, and of the United States during the War. Mann is pitted first against his parent's generation, then battles with his contemporaries, before becoming a legend in his own lifetime who was increasingly losing touch with current moods in politics and manners.

While Mann is seen by others in this novel as patrician, stiff, and materialistic, the reader sees that he was actually never sure of himself in any situation. He initially believes in the power of German culture, and tries to cling to that ideal even as Hitler comes to power. It is not until the War is well underway that he begins to realise that "...Goethe had dreamed of many things, but he had never imagined Buchenwald. No poems about love, or nature, or man, would ever serve to rescue this place from the curse that had descended on it."

This is the central tragedy in the list of disasters that occurred in Mann's life - that he was an integral part of the culture that brought forth not only Goethe and Beethoven, but also the Nazis and the Holocaust. The thought that Hitler listened to the same music that Mann enjoyed was horrific to him.

This is also a novel of family relationships. Mann's siblings and his children are all treated as the different characters that they were in real life. Thomas' problematic relationship with his brother Heinrich is delicately delineated as a series of mis-apprehensions and lack of understanding of each other's life choices and work. His relationship with his wife and children show a father who was too busy to notice his children growing up, and then being surprised to realise that he had produced adults who were so diverse, opinionated, and unconcerned with what their father might think of them, or the world. After fifty years of marriage he is depicted as still unsure what his wife Katia might think after the suicide of their son Klaus.

Katia is the character in the novel who seems to understand not only the political situations that Mann found himself in, but also her children, and the confused sexuality of Thomas that Toibin explores during his life as represented in this book. It could be that Toibin has used Mann's bi-sexualism as the source of his indecisiveness and sense at times of being an imposter. Toibin catalogues a series of trysts, where Mann does not initiate any physical contact: in fact it is more voyeurism and anticipation of physicality that he found exciting. Katia understood Mann's foibles and allowed it, as Toibin has her state to one of the children - "My father was a philanderer. He could not stop himself. He wanted any woman he saw. I have not had that problem with your father."

Toibin is a fine writer, who can evoke different characters, scenes and sub-plots with skill and a seamless style that brings the reader straight to a time and place. He evokes the mind of a writer well - thinking of the next chapter, unsure of whether they are on the right path, trying always to get to "the hard and hidden place where a subject was lured towards the light in a process that was like alchemy."

At the end of the novel Mann returns to post-war Lubeck to receive the keys to the city - a city that spurned him after he had written Buddenbrooks. "In his speech, he spoke about coming full circle... Later... he was almost disappointed, depressed... He had not come full circle at all, he saw, but had merely stumbled along."

So do all of us, doing the best we can with the resources given to us. The Magician is a wonderful evocation of that.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

* For some reason, I am unable to give Toibin the diacritics that his name requires without completely wrecking the formatting of this post. I blame blogger, and apologise for the omission.

Book Review - Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano

 Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano (translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews)

London: Picador, 2010 (first published in Spanish 1996)               ISBN 9780330513883

What a very odd book! I've read one other Bolano book, which I've reviewed here, and which has stayed with me. I think this one will as well.

The premise is that the author (identified as Bolano) has compiled an encyclopaedia of American fascist authors, written in the future (at least 2029). There are entries of varying lengths, a list of secondary authors, publishing houses, and a bibliography of works. This is a book that has taken a lot of effort to write - Bolano has created an entire milieu of inter-connected authors and publishers, as well as the thirty main biographies encompassing a menagerie of characters.

These authors range from psychopathic killers, to fabulists, members of the landed gentry and everything inbetween. The biographical entries also contain criticism of the author's oeuvre: just enough to make the reader intrigued about what reading the complete works would be like. It reminded me of the fragments of now-lost classical works and authors that we see reflected in the surviving contemporary works.

The question that arises from a book such as this is: what is Bolano trying to convey to us, the reader? It's an interesting question. In his biography of Carlos Ramirez Hoffman (the longest and most detailed in the book) Bolano himself appears as an inmate of a Chilean prison owing to his left-wing views. So, we can assume that the author of this encyclopaedia is not sympathetic to the politics of any of the people he is writing about. Yet, as each biography passes us by, with the catalogue of failure and obscurity that is laid out for us, we begin to feel for these misfits. Usually, that is the moment that Bolano hits us with something unspeakable, to shock us back into the realisation of the evil of the fascist ideology.

Given who I am and my cultural background, I saw the title of this book and made the assumption that the authors listed within would be from North America. Of course Bolano, and those who would have read the first edition of this book would have not been surprised that in fact most of the authors in this book come from South America (mainly Chile, Argentina and Brasil).

Most of the authors in this book are obscure - quite a few of them have written what they consider to be major works that sank into obscurity - in fact the "best-selling" author sold much of his work to soccer fans. There is an irony in this book: Bolano treats all of his creators and their works seriously, while at the same time being clear that nearly all of their work fell on deaf ears and sunk without a trace. There is also a finely wrought sense of the absurd throughout the book, as Bolano weaves real writers and events into these tawdry lives.

Bolano did seem to have had a fascination with Fascism, the Third Reich, and World War Two. After his death an early work of his entitled The Third Reich was published, which in my opinion is ambiguous about condemning what the German Army did in the War. I think Nazi Literature in the Americas seems to be more firmly anti-Nazi, but not definitively in my opinion.

So what is this book? It's certainly morbidly fascinating, surprisingly readable, memorable, and a result of considerable effort. What was he trying to say? Of that I'm not so sure - is it to show us that Fascism is evil? Is it to say that it's ridiculous? Is it to comment on the state of South American politics? It's hard to say.

When I read the back-cover blurb for this book, I thought "interesting"; when I was part-way through I thought "strange"; when I finished it I thought "wow". Bolano has put so much work into this book one can do nothing but admire it. The front cover of the edition I read has a blurb that reads "Lucid, insane, deadly serious, wildly playful, bibliomaniacal, and perversely imaginative" - I can't really say more than that.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell