Colm Tóibín Knows What Moves the Heart
The moon, the Virgin Mary, the beauty of internal organs—these are just a few of the topics that come up when Irish author Colm Tóibín and American artist Kiki Smith get together. This time, the occasion is Tóibín’s tenth novel, The Magician, an imaginative, exquisitely researched account of the public and private life of the great German writer Thomas Mann. If every novel is a conversation between author and reader across time, Tóibín brings it full circle. He takes us back to Mann’s age, where we meet an ambitious, closeted artist at the turn of the 20th century, mixing in German aristocracy and bohemia, just as the world was turning “modern.” Here, from across the Atlantic, two friends talk about their creative impulses and how art gets made when you leave the ego out.