Colm Toibin illuminates the masks of Thomas Mann
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“The Magician” (The Magician), by Colm Toibin, translated from English (Ireland) by Anna Gibson, Grasset, “En lettres d’ancre”, 608 p., €26, digital €18.
The work and the person of the German writer Thomas Mann (1875-1955) pose a serious enigma to literary history. Unlike many of its contemporaries, this classic of modernity, the incarnation of the Germany of the Enlightenment, of reconciliation with democratic mores, has enjoyed, since the 1980s, renewed favor both with the international public and new generations of German writers. Across the Rhine, it is rare that new authors do not secretly caress the ambition to write their “great Mannian novel”. The latent homosexuality of this father of six children, the blurring of overly simple narrative tracks and the ironic distance that characterize his style have never ceased to captivate filmmakers, authors and critics. Since the 2000s, it has become a favorite subject for queer studies. As the writer summed it up very well Daniel Kehlmannwinner of the Thomas Mann Prize, in 2008: “Could it be that his greatness is also inseparable from a dark side and that his greatness cannot be accessed without what bothers us about him? »
The vast biographical novel proposed by the Irish writer Colm Toibin, The magician, provides excellent support for this hypothesis. By insisting on the fundamental duality of existence as of Mann’s writing, this book provides one of the reasons for the stainless and paradoxical familiarity that the author of Tonio Kröger (1903) continues to spark around the world. The ambivalence of a modernity torn between progress and barbarism, between globalization and entrenchment, is also reflected in Toibin’s own enterprise. When one is oneself a prolific author, devoting oneself to a writer rooted in a cultural and linguistic space different from one’s own, immersing oneself for years in the immense bibliography which concerns him testifies both to great literary generosity and of a desire to escape assignments.
Colm Toibin never pastiche his model
Colm Toibin, who never pastiches his model, puts his approach on stage, or “in abyss”, in a passage where Mann, surprised in Sweden by the declaration of war in 1939 and while trying to return in haste to his American refuge, is blocked by British officials: “When the customs officers discovered a drawing by Thomas of a room, with an oval table in the center and names scrawled around it, they became concerned. “It’s for my novel [Charlotte à Weimar, 1939], explained Thomas. It’s a sketch of Goethe’s dining room. See, his name is written here, and the other names are his guests. It happened at the beginning of the 19th century.e century. – How do you know who was around the table? asked one of the customs officers. – I do not know. I imagine how they were seated so that I could imagine their conversation”. »
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