Volume 29, Number 2 · February 18, 1982
The Magician
By Gabriele Annan
Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist
by Richard Winston
Knopf, 325 pp., $17.95
In 1975 Thomas Mann's publisher, S. Fischer, brought out Der Zauberer ('The Magician'), the first volume of Peter de Mendelssohn's biography of the great German novelist. It has 1,181 pages of fairly small and very small print, the very small being for quotations—many of them several paragraphs in length—from diaries, letters, working notes, autobiographical sketches, unpublished material, marginalia, and so on: one would guess about a third of the text to be quotation. It covers only just over half of Mann's life, from 1875 to 1918—he died in 1955—and is daunting, though far from unenjoyable. Very much the contrary: it is full of insight and amazingly lively and direct, even colloquial sometimes.
Review, 3935 words
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