Current Reading: The Magician

Last night, I started reading Colm Toibin's The Magician. Toibin's novel tells the story of the life and work of the great Thomas Mann. The goodreads summary says of the book:

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.

Thus far the book is very much worth reading. I do enjoy reading the occasional 500 page plus novel. Of these big novels, Anthony Burgess once wrote that the novelist can not resist trying to play God. Theology aside, I think that both Toibin's novels, as well as Mann's novels such as the Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, are excellent ways to spend a few hours, at least in my humble opinion.