There are two leading figures in this remarkable 500 page novel—-the author of this fictional biography, Colm Toibin, and the object of the biography, Thomas Mann.

Toibin, a gay Irish author who teaches at Columbia has been nominated or has won a number of prestigious literary prizes honoring a career of writing novels, essays, poetry and short stories.  He has written a previous fictionalized biography, ‘The Master’, about Henry James who he credits along with Mann as his major fictional influences.

Mann, born in northern Germany in 1875 won the Nobel Prize in 1929 in recognition of his major novels, ‘Buddenbrooks’, ‘The Magic Mountain’, and ‘Death in Venice’.  He fled Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power, settling in Switzerland and finally Pacific Palisades, CA.  He returned to Switzerland and died there in 1955.  His commitment to German culture’s poetry, literature, and music was a central theme in his work.

Toibin tells the story of Mann’s life as an omniscient third person narrator providing us with Mann’s interior thoughts, conversations, and actions in a way that is totally different and much more engaging than a standard biography.  The passion, conflicts, and shifting relationships between Mann and his family, first his aloof merchant/senator father and his Brazilian-born emotional mother, and then his Jewish wife and their six children, form the core of the book against the background of two world wars and the division of Germany into East and West.

Mann’s closeted and nearly totally unacted upon homosexuality is prominent in the book as is his focus on his writing while the intrigues and conflicts among his children swirl about him relatively unnoticed.  He had two sisters who committed suicide as did his oldest child, and he was often estranged from his more leftist and internationalist brother, but these tragedies seemed to largely leave him untouched. Toibin’s portrait of Mann is one of an individual who was indistinguishable from his writing and whose writing was deeply enmeshed with his life.  ‘Buddenbrooks’ draws heavily upon the Mann family’s world in Lubeck at the end of the 19th C. ‘The Magic Mountain’ is based on Mann’s wife and his own experience at a sanitorium in Davos and ‘Death in Venice’ is Mann’s fantasy about a young boy he becomes obsessed with during a visit to Venice.  In Mann’s world, the line between reality and fiction was often blurred and this was reflected in his changing poses in his actual life.

Toibin has done a remarkable job in this superb novel, and having read three of Mann’s novels mentioned above, I’d urge you to read them as well.  They’re brilliant and worth the effort.