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Thomas Mann called his fifth novelDoctor Faustus.
Of course, Mann already had a Nobel Prize, which hed won in 1929.
What more could he want?
How does an artist create, and can a true artist live as the rest of us do?
He mostly seems to be sayingthank youto his heroes.
Its hard to imagine a reader for these novels who didnt share the authors affection for their protagonists.
The bulk ofThe Magicianis about Manns marriage to Katia Pringsheim, and the six children they had together.
The novel is frank about Manns desires, and renders them with thoughtful complexity.
Thomas had never arrived in Venice by sea before.
Yes, we might have guessed.
But Toibin has a liberty that the biographer must envy.
But Toibins Erika and her siblings never interested me as much as her father did.
Still, if the family crowds the man off the page, this is by design.
That true self nevertheless emerges, sometimes discomfitingly.
As a youth, his eldest son had struck him as being especially beautiful.
Once, on coming into the bedroom that Klaus shared with Golo, he had found Klaus naked.
Theres no condemnation inThe Magician, nor is there pity.
Instead theres the understanding that a great artist might be, after all, only a human.
I suspect that Toibin would consider my turning back to Mann a mission accomplished.
