by Colm Toibin
* * *
I am grateful to Mary Mount at Penguin UK, Nan Graham at Scribner in New York, and my agent Peter Straus, for their scrupulous attention to my book, and to Holger Pils for the generous sharing of his deep knowledge of Thomas Mann’s life and work. And also, as usual, to Angela Rohan, as well as to Catriona Crowe, Hedi El Kholti and Ed Mulhall, and Piero Salabè from Hanser Verlag in Germany.
A Scribner Reading Group Guide
The Magician
Colm Toibin
This reading group guide for The Magician includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
It’s the turn of the twentieth century in Lübeck, a small city in Germany, and young Thomas Mann grows up with a conservative German father and a Brazilian mother who challenges the propriety of the people around her. In this deeply researched and spectacularly imagined novel, Tóibín sets the scene for the life of the novelist Thomas Mann, as he marries a young woman from one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich and fathers six children. Mann struggles with his sexuality, becomes a prolific novelist and then is immersed in the complex and devastating politics of the two world wars.
He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. In 1933, he flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, while his brother and several of his children are leaders of the anti-Nazi movement. The Magician is an intimate portrait of Mann, his magnificent wife, Katia, and the times in which they lived—the First World War, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War and exile. This is a man and a family fiercely engaged by the world, profoundly flawed and unforgettable.
Discussion Questions
From an early age, Thomas is very much in the public eye of Lübeck. How do you think this affects his emotional development?
On page 23, Thomas reflects “No matter where he went, he would never be important again.” What do you make of that amount of self-awareness from one so young?
On page 72, Thomas meets Klaus and Katia for the first time. How is their relationship as siblings different from the relationships that Thomas has with his? And what draws him to them?
Almost immediately after his sudden intimacy with Herr Huhnemann (pg. 75), Thomas decides to propose to Katia. Why do you think he made this decision?
On page 107, Mann reflects that he “realized that after his sister’s death he had busied himself with writing. Sometimes he even managed to believe that her suicide had not even happened.” What do you make of this detachment from grieving? How is it similar to (or different from) the way Thomas handled the death of his father?
On page 177, Katharina Schweighardt, the landlady who cares for Julia Mann, says, “No one who has been used to money can live with that. That is how the world is.” How do you see this reflected in other members of the Mann family?
Tóibín describes a profound union between Katia and Thomas. They have an unspoken agreement about his sexuality and how it plays out in their marriage. Why do you think Katia accepts this this arrangement? How do you read her wants and desires as a character?
On pages 209–10, Thomas reflects that “His two eldest children, he understood, could not be damaged as he could be. Their standing in the world depended on their open dismissal of easy sexual categories. Any effort to undermine their reputation would be banished by their own careless laughter and that of their friends. But no one would be amused if sections of his diary were to be published.” Discuss why Thomas is afraid. What do you make of Thomas’s sexualization of younger boys (including his own son)?
Throughout the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power, Thomas struggles with his place in the public eye. What are his reasons for not immediately denouncing Hitler, and do you think they are selfish? Misguided? Why or why not?
On page 276, Thomas says in reference to his writing, “I can make no sense of the present. It is all confusion. I know nothing about the future.” How do you think this applies to his approach to life in general, and specifically to his writing up to this point in the novel?
The chapter on page 445 opens with the statement: “The war was over; Thomas had not experienced it. He did not know what its aftermath meant.” As Thomas experiences Germany after the war, how does this play out?
After Thomas refuses to attend Klaus’s funeral, he receives a letter from Michael, which admonishes him for not being more present to his own children, while always seeking his success as a writer first. What impact do you think this letter has on Thomas?
At the end of The Magician, reflect on what you think Thomas’s main motivations in life are. Could he have been successful in pursuing these without women like Katia and Erika?
Once you’ve finished The Magician, do some group research on the historical Thomas Mann. What aspects of the novel seem to be direct corollaries to his life, and which things may be of the author’s imagination?
Enhance Your Book Club
Supplemental reading:
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann (Tóibín recommends the translations by John E. Woods or John Edwards.)
Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature by Anthony Heilbut
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Supplemental viewing:
Jojo Rabbit
Katja Mann: A Life with Thomas Mann (via Amazon)
Death in Venice
For a full list of additional resources, please visit colmtoibin.com.
More from the Author
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
House of Names
Nora Webster
The Blackwater Lightship
The Testament of Mary
The Heather Blazing
About the Author
© BRIGITTE LACOMBE
Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master, about the American expatriate writer Henry James, was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly and many other periodicals. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tóibín is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award, two collections of short stories and many works of criticism. Tóibín is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Colm-Toibin
@ScribnerBooks
ALSO BY COLM TÓIBÍN
FICTION
The South
The Heather Blazing
The Story of the Night
The Blackwater Lightship
The Master
Mothers and Sons
Brooklyn
The Empty Family
The Testament of Mary
Nora Webster
House of Names
NONFICTION
Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border
Homage to Barcelona
The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe
Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar
Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush
All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James
New Ways to Kill Your Mother
On Elizabeth Bishop
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce
PLAYS
Beauty in a Broken Place
The Testament of Mary
Pale Sister
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Colm Tóibín
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First Scribner hardcover edition September 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tóibín, Colm, 1955– author.
Title: The magician : a novel / Colm Tóibín.
Description: New York : Scribner, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021004476 (print) | LCCN 2021004477 (ebook) | ISBN 9781476785080 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781476785097 (paperback) | ISBN 9781476785103 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PR6070.O455 M34 2021 (print) | LCC PR6070.O455 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004476
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004477
ISBN 978-1-4767-8508-0
ISBN 978-1-4767-8510-3 (ebook)