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Jeffrey

The Magician

January 7, 2022 by Jeffrey Leave a Comment

Title of novel, The MagicianTitle: The Magician by Colm Toíbín
Format: Novel
Audience: Adults

The Magician is a sweeping novel of unrequited love and exile, war and family, and a conflict between one’s own selfhood and deep, hidden emotions. A blend of personal struggles with global events, this is a fictional account of the German novelist, Thomas Mann, and his fascinating life, told by one of the greatest living writers of our time, Colm Toíbín.

Mann, a supporter of Germany’s ambitions in the year of 1914, soon finds his vision of a county on the eve of becoming a progressive nation built upon a platform of social reform divulge into disillusionment. A man who found himself on the wrong side of history in the First World War in his encouragement of a better, more expansive Germany, only to then witness the devolution of his nation in the hands of the Nazis, Mann was constantly at war with himself as he fought to not only understand the world around him, but who he was as well. Mann, who would write some of Europe’s greatest pieces of literature, was forever embattled with acclaim and contradiction, as he surrounded himself with a life that portrayed something entirely different than who he truly was.

Toíbín has created a breathtaking recounting of Thomas Mann’s life – a Nobel Prize and Goethe Prize winning author – in which should be viewed as a celebration of what a novel is able to accomplish and express.

Find The Magician in the catalog.

Filed Under: Recommended for Adults Tagged With: Contemporary, Germany, Historical Fiction, World War I

Beautiful World, Where Are You

September 28, 2021 by Jeffrey Leave a Comment

Title of the novel, Beautiful World Where Are You.Title: Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Format: Novel
Audience: Late Teens and Adults

Sally Rooney’s third novel is as much a Sally Rooney novel as she intends it to be – one where the author does not shy away from being who she is, nor does she pretend to be someone she is not. Beautiful World, Where Are You is a dialectical relationship to her prior works, and in following two critically acclaimed publications, Rooney has solved the burden of success insofar as by writing about the burden of success.

Readers who enjoyed Conversations with Friends and Normal People will certainly find fulfillment in Rooney’s newest work. Part epistolary, part an exploration of ideas, and part a telling of young love, this novel is a jostle of fascinating concepts that attempt to tackle both issues on a grander scale, and ones that hit too close to home. Set around four individuals who, while still young, feel life catching up to them, and whose relationships with one another are tangled together, all approach life in different ways, and it is their understanding of what they know they want compared to what they are unsure or, more possibly, unaware of, that spurs on the decisions they make, and the ramifications that follow.

From the dialogue that does not falter, to the prose that flows seamlessly from page to page, to the discussions of the environment we live in and the future we are to construct, Rooney has created a wonderful work that truly does ask the reader the question, where is this beautiful world?

 

Find Beautiful World, Where Are You in print via the catalog.

Find Beautiful World, Where Are You online via an eAudiobook and an eBook.

 

Filed Under: New for Adults Tagged With: Contemporary, Friendship, Interpersonal Relations, Ireland

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