Nombrado Mejor Libro del Ano por The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal.
El mago comienza en una ciudad provinciana de Alemania a inicios del siglo XX, donde un nino, Thomas Mann, crece junto a un padre conservador, atado por el decoro, y una madre brasilena, seductora e impredecible. El joven Mann le oculta a su padre sus aspiraciones artisticas y a todos los demas sus deseos homosexuales. Esta encantado con una de las familias judias mas ricas y cultas de Munich, y se casa con la hija, Katia. Tienen seis hijos. En unas vacaciones por Italia, suspira por un muchacho que ve en una playa y escribe la historia Muerte en Venecia. Se convierte en el novelista mas exitoso de su tiempo, ganador del Premio Nobel de literatura; un hombre publico cuya vida privada permanece en secreto. Se espera que encabece la condena hacia de Hitler, a quien subestima. Su hija mayor y su hijo, lideres del bohemianismo y el movimiento antinazi, comparten amantes. El huye de Alemania hacia Suiza, Francia y, finalmente, Estados Unidos, radicando primero en Princeton y mas tarde en Los Angeles.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
Colm Toibin’s new novel 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.
The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex 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.
