Colm Toibin has undeniably mastered the art of literary fiction. But how enjoyable his literary fiction is remains a highly subjective manner. I’ve read five of his books prior to this, including The Master, his other stab at a literary biography and by far my least favorite of the bunch. In fact, probably should have revisited that review before reading The Magician, but what can I say…in a rare feat of optimism I wanted this book to be…well, magical. But then again, you can’t fight the empirical facts and sure enough empirically it was decidedly less than. In fact, the easiest thing to do for me here would be to copy and paste my review of Toibin’s Master, because so much of it applies perfectly here. But no, I’m going to try to write something fresh about it…
So…this is a literary biographical imagining of the life of Mann, a highly respectable much lauded Pulitzer winning author I’ve never had any interest in reading. The main draw here was historical fiction aspect, Mann lived for 80 years and the novel follows his life pretty closely across time and oceans from the late 19th all the way through the mid 20th century. Through two world wars (though the main focus remains on the second one) and many ups and down of personal and professional life. It’s all very intellectually interesting and undeniably well written and stylized. It’s also languidly paced, not overly emotionally engaging, occasionally soporific and with very deliberate and very obvious choices to focus on some things and skim others to represent its star in the best possible light. So your overall enjoyment of the novel will be directly proportional on your overall enjoinment of Mann as a man. So Mann…Mann wrote very long, very heavy novels. Mann was a semi closeted (non practicing) gay with distinct (albeit allegedly unacted upon) pederastic leanings. Or maybe it’s safer to say that his homosexual tendencies ere very much of a classic Greek variety featuring a very pronounced fascination with youth. But for all his life Mann tried to choose the path of least resistance, so he married a woman from a very wealthy family and stayed married to her for something like fifty years, producing six children, which is prolific for any man, gay or straight, and as rendered in the book the marriage was a fairly happy one, though outside of a jokey explanation by his wife that she didn’t want her man to sleep around with other women like her father did, the appeal of Mann to Katia isn’t as immediate as her appeal to him. She was instrumental to him, as his partner, assistant, defender, etc. A number of their kids turned out variously useless, some inherited Mann’s homosexual tendencies, none inherited his writing talents. Throughout their life they frequently required his financial and otherwise support as did his brother, a writer himself, albeit of less success and from the opposing political spectrum. Mann opposed fascism, but prevaricated in renouncing it (as he did navigating most turbulent politics waters of his time), always all too well aware of exigencies of staying a published author. Eventually (his wife was Jewish) he had to take a stance. The Manns immigrated and had a relatively cushy life in America, until he went and pissed off the powers that be by traveling to the communist East after the war. This was the only time Mann took a vehement stance of something political and it seemed almost out of character. Throughout his life Mann helplessly ogled young men, enough so that people around him noticed, not enough that they minded. Who knows what sort of sadness that level of repression produces in a man. We won’t know, the novel (for all its length and details) oddly enough doesn’t really delve to that extent into its subject psyche. The overall impression is of skimming waters, almost deliberately refusing to go dive in. Subsequently, you get to know the autobiographical facts, but not really the person behind them. And you don’t necessarily like what you do get to know of him. For me, that was kind of frustrating. And so the novel dragged. Because social media has so lamentably enabled people to be their worst rudest selves, I’ve recently been told by a random stranger on GR to learn to differentiate between a good novel and a novel that doesn’t work for me. I believe I can (thank you very much) and thus I can state with confidence that this is most likely a good book but one that didn’t really work for me. Toibin’s writing itself isn’t in question, it’s how uncompelling his technically flawless fiction comes out that leaves a lot to be desired. And it seems I do prefer it when he sticks to fictional subjects. I’m sure this’ll work differently for different readers. It’s definitely one of those books. Thanks Netgalley.
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