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The Magician: A Novel - Hardcover

Toibin, Colm

 
9781476785080: The Magician: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1476785082 ISBN 13: 9781476785080
Verlag: Scribner, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Notable Book, Critic’s Top Pick, and Top Ten Book of Historical Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg Businessweek

​From one of today’s most brilliant and beloved novelists, a dazzling, epic family saga set across a half-century spanning World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War that is “a feat of literary sorcery in its own right” (Oprah Daily).

The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.

In this “exquisitely sensitive” (The Wall Street Journal) novel, Tóibín has crafted “a complex but empathetic portrayal of a writer in a lifelong battle against his innermost desires, his family, and the tumultuous times they endure” (Time), and “you’ll find yourself savoring every page” (Vogue).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Colm Tóibín is the author of ten novels, including The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

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Chapter 1: Lübeck, 1891 Chapter 1 Lübeck, 1891
His mother waited upstairs while the servants took coats and scarves and hats from the guests. Until everyone had been ushered into the drawing room, Julia Mann remained in her bedroom. Thomas and his older brother Heinrich and their sisters Lula and Carla watched from the first landing. Soon, they knew, their mother would appear. Heinrich had to warn Carla to be quiet or they would be told to go to bed and they would miss the moment. Their baby brother Viktor was sleeping in an upper room.

With her hair pinned back severely and tied in a colored bow, Julia stepped out from her bedroom. Her dress was white, and her black shoes, ordered specially from Majorca, were simple like a dancer’s shoes.

She joined the company with an air of reluctance, giving the impression that she had, just now, been alone with herself in a place more interesting than festive Lübeck.

On coming into the drawing room, having glanced around her, Julia would find among the guests one person, usually a man, someone unlikely such as Herr Kellinghusen, who was neither young nor old, or Franz Cadovius, his squint inherited from his mother, or Judge August Leverkühn, with his thin lips and clipped mustache, and this man would become the focus of her attention.

Her allure came from the atmosphere of foreignness and fragility that she exuded with such charm.

Yet there was kindness in her flashing eyes as she asked her guest about work and family and plans for the summer, and, speaking of the summer, she would wish to know about the relative comfort of various hotels in Travemünde, and then she would ask about grand hotels in places as distant as Trouville or Collioure or some resort on the Adriatic.

And soon she would pose an unsettling question. She would ask what her interlocutor thought about some normal and respectable woman within their group of associates. The suggestion was that this woman’s private life was a matter of some controversy and speculation among the burghers of the town. Young Frau Stavenhitter, or Frau Mackenthun, or old Fraulein Distelmann. Or someone even more obscure and retiring. And when her bewildered guest would point out that he had nothing other than good to say of the woman, in fact had nothing beyond the very ordinary to transmit, Thomas’s mother would express the view that the object of their discussion was, in her considered opinion, a marvelous person, simply delicious, and Lübeck was lucky to have such a woman among its citizens. She would say this as if it were a revelation, something that must stay quite confidential for the moment, something, indeed, that even her husband, the senator, had not yet been told.

The following day, news would spread about their mother’s deportment and whom she had singled out for comment, until Heinrich and Thomas would hear about it from their school friends, as if it were a very modern play, fresh from Hamburg, that had been performed.

In the evenings, if the senator were at a meeting, or in the time when Thomas and Heinrich, having done their violin practice and eaten their supper, were in their nightclothes, their mother would tell them about the country of her birth, Brazil, a place so vast, she said, that no one knew how many people were there or what they were like or what languages they spoke, a country many, many times the size of Germany, where there was no winter, and never any frost or real cold, and where one river, the Amazon, was more than ten times longer than the Rhine and ten times as wide, with many smaller rivers flowing into it that reached back deep into the forest, with trees higher than trees anywhere else in the world, with people whom no one had ever seen or would see, since they knew the forest as no one else did, and they could hide if an intruder or an outsider came.

“Tell us about the stars,” Heinrich would say.

“Our house in Paraty was on the water,” Julia would reply. “It was almost part of the water, like a boat. And when night came and we could see the stars, they were bright and low in the sky. Here in the north the stars are high and distant. In Brazil, they are visible like the sun during the day. They are small suns themselves, glittering and close to us, especially those of us who lived near water. My mother said you could sometimes read a book in the upstairs rooms at night because the light from the stars against the water was so clear. And you could not sleep unless you fastened the shutters to keep the brightness out. When I was a girl, the same age as your sisters, I really believed that all the world was like that. The shock on my first night in Lübeck was that I could not see the stars. They were covered over by clouds.”

“Tell us about the ship.”

“You must go to sleep.”

“Tell us the story of all the sugar.”

“Tommy, you know the story of the sugar.”

“But just a small part again?”

“Well, all the marzipan that is made in Lübeck uses sugar that comes from Brazil. Just as Lübeck is famous for marzipan, Brazil is famous for sugar. So when the good people of Lübeck and their children eat their marzipan on Christmas Eve, little do they know that they are eating a part of Brazil. They are eating sugar that came across the sea just for them.”

“Why don’t we make our own sugar?”

“You must ask your father that.”

Years later, Thomas wondered if his father’s decision to marry Julia da Silva-Bruhns, whose mother was reputed to have had in her veins blood from South American Indians, rather than a stolid daughter of one of the local shipping magnates or old trading and banking families, was not the beginning of the decline of the Manns, evidence that a hunger for the richly strange had entered the spirit of the family, which had, up to then, possessed an appetite only for what was upright and certain to yield a steady return.

In Lübeck, Julia was remembered as a small girl arriving with her sister and her three brothers after their mother had died. They were taken care of by an uncle, and they did not, when they appeared first in the city, have a word of German. They were watched suspiciously by figures such as old Frau Overbeck, known for her staunch adherence to the practices of the Reformed Church.

“I saw those children blessing themselves one day as they passed the Marienkirche,” she said. “It may be necessary to trade with Brazil, but I know no precedent for a Lübeck burgher marrying a Brazilian, none at all.”

Julia, only seventeen at the time of her marriage, gave birth to five children who carried themselves with all the dignity required of the children of the senator, but with an added pride and self-consciousness, and something close to display, which Lübeck had not seen before and which Frau Overbeck and her circle hoped would not become fashionable.

Due to this decision to marry unusually, the senator, eleven years older than his wife, was viewed with a certain awe, as though he had invested in Italian paintings or rare majolica, acquired to satisfy a taste that, up to then, the senator and his antecedents had kept in check.

Before leaving for church on Sunday, the Mann children had to be carefully examined by their father while their mother delayed them by remaining upstairs in her dressing room, trying on hats or changing her shoes. Heinrich and Thomas had to show a good example by...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476785082
ISBN 13 
9781476785080
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
512
Kontakt zum Hersteller
SCRIBNER
https://www.simonandschusterpublishing.com/scribner/

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