Mario and the Magician and Other Stories

"The Magician is a magisterial work taking in a wide sweep of twentieth-century history while sensitively dissecting the inner life of one of the greatest writers of his day. A lesser author than Tóibín would have been overwhelmed by the richness of his material, spanning as it does the rise of Nazism, Mann’s need to escape from Germany with his Jewish wife and family, and his turbulent years in America. But The Magician is a novel, not a biography, and Tóibín’s focus is always on Mann himself, his homo-erotic longings, his curious detachment from his unruly children and the way in which he used his own experiences to create his novels. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It certainly is! We’ve all read it twice, and I think it’s true to say that we enjoyed it even more second time round. As with any first class book, the more you look, the more you find. This is a difficult question to answer because historical fiction is hard to quantify. We forget that Tolstoy’s War and Peace was a historical novel, and so was Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities . We’re finding now that many writers, some with long and distinguished careers behind them, are looking to the past for inspiration, perhaps because our own times are so confused, perhaps because there are so many more accessible and authoritative studies of history, both written and filmed, which are easily available as material. So yes, I’d say that ‘historical fiction’ is indeed in rude health, and is getting stronger and more interesting all the time. Part of our best books of 2022 series."

"The story is about a family vacation. The narrator, his wife and two young children—all German—travel to the town of Torre di Venere, a little town in Italy, in the 1920s. It begins with joy and enthusiasm and quickly deteriorates when the family meets the phenomena of Italian nationalism and Fascism. At the centre of the story is a hypnotists’s performance that ends in an unexpected and tragic way. The main character is the strange and arrogant hypnotist, Cipolla, an expert in taking over people’s will power and subjugating their minds to him. The subtext of the story is (of course) Fascism and the wish of people to give up their free will and deposit it into hands of authority, let it be the Duce, or Cipolla. The mechanism of turning towards fanaticism and Fascism is the same in 1926 as in 2017. The more confusing and violent the world becomes, people are more eager to find shelter in superficiality and to identify with and even assimilate into an imagined strong and “Fatherly” personality. Cipolla wouldn’t allow anyone to share the stage with him. He is a hunchback, a repulsive, ugly person in appearance and mannerism, in his vanity, in the deep contempt in which he holds the audience. But I think his power comes from the feeling that there is a struggle inside himself… his personality is a permanent inner battle. This is what attracts us as spectators, as readers, to such a show: that we are allowed to peep into the hell of another human being—it is, of course, an irresistible temptation."