Thomas Mann Archives - Bob on Books

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The Weekly Wrap: June 1-7

Whither, or Wither, Amazon Books?

On Friday, Publisher’s Weekly, announced “Amazon Cuts Jobs in Book Division.” They say they are cutting fewer than 100 roles, which doesn’t tell us how many people are losing their jobs. This includes layoffs at their Kindle and Goodreads units. This is after the company saw a 30% increase in the sales of Kindles following release of a new generation of devices. There were no comments about the performance of Goodreads.

Remember when Amazon was a bookseller? One associated Amazon with books. You could find just about anything and get it delivered quickly. While that is still largely true, more of the book sales depend on third party sellers using the platform.

Remember when Goodreads was the online place you and your friends talked about the books you were reading? Sure one can still do this, but Amazon uses the platform for marketing and has made few improvements. Meanwhile newcomers, as well as the venerable LibraryThing, create more opportunities for reader interaction as well as offering features not available on Goodreads.

Amazon says it is consolidating roles with other divisions, probably for operating efficiency. But they are cutting the number of people working with books at a time when both Barnes & Noble and the indie bookstore market are growing. It seems the focus is on efficiency and technology.

Amazon is still the behemoth when it comes to bookselling and publishers and other booksellers must reckon with it. The truth is, though, no one is too big to fail. If Amazon relies only on algorithms and AI to sell us books and provide us online spaces to talk about them, they just might be surprised how many prefer other places to buy books and other platforms to talk about them. But perhaps books aren’t that interesting when you can launch celebrities into space for less than 15 minutes for big bucks and notoriety.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Imagine if your job provided a research stipend that covered the cost of books. Deb Olin Unferth discovered that this is a very mixed blessing. “The Stipend” is also a fascinating exploration of our propensity as bibliophiles to acquire books far in excess of our capacity to read them.

The Atlantic has begun a new series involving writers retracing the steps of their favorite authors. In the first of these, Caity Weaver is “An Innocent Abroad in Mark Twain’s Paris.” She both recounts Twains travels and her own journey, complete with a number of photographs.

Rivers are defining features in our geography. Towns are built along them and many industries depend on them. In a new book, Robert Macfarlane explores Is a River Alive? In “Britain’s Premier Nature Writer Cries Us a River” one of my favorite reviewers, Jennifer Szalai gives us her take on the book.

Thomas Mann was born 150 years ago yesterday, on June 6, 1875. At one time, Mann embrace militaristic nationalism but eventually repudiated Nazi fascism, becoming an advocate of liberal democracy, even while persisting in conservative values. Ed Simon traces “The Political Journey of Thomas Mann.” The concluding quote by Mann is sobering: “Let me tell you the whole truth. If ever fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of freedom.”

Avoiding the use of adverbs is common advice in writing programs. In “Defending Adverbs Exuberantly if Conditionally,” Lincoln Michel gives a qualified and tongue-in-cheek defense for the use of the lowly adverb.

Quote of the Week

Fittingly(!), Thomas Mann provides our quote this week. Would that the nations, and indeed all of us would learn this:

“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Two new books highlighted in this Publisher’s Weekly newsletter focus on “Business Lessons from Taylor Swift.” With a net worth of $1.5 billion, there might be some things others in the billionaire class might learn from her, if they are willing to learn from a woman. I was struck with this observation: “The book underscores her philosophy that success and joy is found in the giving itself, not just quantifiable monetary success.”

As it happens, I’m reading a biography of Emily Dickinson. I’m struck by her choice of seclusion and decision not to publish her work during her life. That doesn’t mean she didn’t get critical appraisal. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who played a founding role in The Atlantic, was her literary critic, pointing out awkward constructions while respecting her decision not to publish. For this, he was rewarded with the opportunity to co-edit the first collection of her work published posthumously.

This year marks a year of The Weekly Wrap. I would love to say it has been a huge success but that is still largely aspirational. But my aim is to try to curate news and articles that enrich the reading life of other readers as they have mine. I’d love to hear your thoughts, both what you’ve liked, and what you would like in this weekly literary journey. And please forward this to your friends if you like what I’m doing. Since I do this pro bono (and I have reasons for that), I won’t make more money. But it is fun to reach more people with one’s ideas! And thanks for reading!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

Tuesday: Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

Wednesday: Georges Simenon, The Saint Fiacre Affair

Thursday: Scott Cairns, Love’s Immensity

Friday: Dr. Lisa Compton and Taylor Patterson, Skills for Safeguarding

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for June 1-7, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

The Magician, Colm Tóibín. New York: Scribner, 2021.

Summary: A fictionalized biography of German writer Thomas Mann, his bourgeois beginnings, his lifelong homoeroticism, his rise as a writer, flight from Germany, ambivalence about denouncing Nazism, and alienation from his children.

Colm Tóibín has done this before. His 2004 The Master is a fictionalized portrayal of Henry James. Now he applies his narrative skills to the life of Thomas Mann. What he gives us, apart from Mann’s inner mental life, reads like a biography. It might almost be said this is fictional autobiography because Tóibín explores what it was to be Thomas Mann, as well as his impact upon those around him, siblings, wife, and children.

We begin with Mann’s boyhood in Lubeck, with a father who is both senator and businessman. Yet his sons Heinrich and Thomas both have literary dreams, as much as Thomas wants to please his father. He discovers upon his father’s early death that he has not inherited the business and begins to embark on a writerly career.

One of the early elements that runs through this story is Mann’s closeted homoeroticism. Apart from a couple of youthful encounters, the second of which may have propelled his proposal to Katia Pringsheim, Tóibín portrays this as consisting of admiring gazes and unconsummated attractions, confided to his diaries, which only came to light in 1975 (although the narrative describes Mann on tenterhooks as he tries to secure the safe shipping of the diaries out of Germany, when his haste to leave forced him to leave them behind at the house). Katia is portrayed in somewhat masculine terms in his thoughts, and they stay together, having six children. He agrees not to embarrass the family and she lives with his wayward glances, explaining at one point that having grown up with a father who was a philanderer, she wanted to marry someone who wouldn’t be.

Her support of his writing, shielding him in his study from the troubles of his children lead to singularly written works, winning him the Nobel in literature. Tóibín traces the inspiration of his works–a homoerotic attraction to a boy (Death in Venice), his and his wife’s experience at a mountaintop sanatorium (The Magic Mountain), and his own bourgeois family (Buddenbrooks). While he eventually gains global acclaim, he loses the respect, although never the loyalty, of his children. After the suicide death of Klaus, his eldest, troubled by what seems like manic depression exacerbated by substance abuse, his son Michael, having attended the funeral Thomas shunned, writes, “I am sure the world is grateful to you for the undivided attention you have given to your books, but we, your children, do not feel any gratitude to you, or indeed to our mother, who sat by your side.”

Another layer of this portrayal is Thomas’s struggle to believe that Germany would embrace Nazism. Unlike both his brother Heinrich and son Klaus, he was moderate in political views, a Social Democrat. Tóibín traces his slow progress (too slow for Klaus and eldest daughter Erika) in speaking against Nazism from his “Appeal to Reason” in 1930 to his BBC broadcasts beginning in 1939. He remained in publication in Germany much longer than many other anti-Nazi writers because of his guarded statements, both out of deference to his publisher, and out of concern for family still in Germany, which he had fled in 1933, first for Switzerland, then Czechoslovakia, and finally, along with Einstein to the U.S. He then used his stature to help secure the emigration of family and other close associates.

He lived first in Princeton, then in California, but even then found his speech constrained by Agnes Meyer, the wife of the publisher of the Washington Post and a conduit from Roosevelt, who made sure Mann’s speeches didn’t damage Roosevelt’s political efforts to marshal support for the war. Only in the post-war era where Mann cannot shed a Communist label, does he say what he truly thinks, moving back to Switzerland. Oddly, in these later years it is Erika, who shared Klaus’s views (and sometimes his lovers–it was an interesting brother-sister relationship), who handled her father’s affairs as he finally came closer to her outspokenness.

Tóibín portrays Mann in all his complexity–his brilliance as a writer, his rich interior life, and his measured courage. We marvel at a marriage, fraught with challenges, that works and of two people, Thomas and Katia who are fierce intellectual and emotional life partners. We ache with the pain of others who live around Mann, the two sisters and the son who commit suicide, the brother whose writing career is overshadowed, and the children hurt in different ways. One wonders if the closeted homoeroticism of Mann fueled his writing and whether it all would have been different today. Or what would have happened had Katia Pringsheim not consented to marry him?

I read a couple of Mann’s works twenty years or so ago. This portrayal and the connections between his books and his life make me want to return to them. I know I will read them with different eyes.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.