Books like Mario and the Magician
On holiday at an Italian seaside resort in the late 1920s, a German family goes to the show of Cipolla, a hunchbacked hypnotist who bends his audience to his will.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Mario and the Magician
The Aspern Papers
An American editor takes rooms in a crumbling Venetian palazzo, posing as a lodger, to get his hands on the love letters a dead Romantic poet wrote to the very old woman who lives there with her niece.
L'Arrabbiata
On the coast near Sorrento, Laurella, a proud young woman who has sworn never to marry, is rowed across to Capri by Antonino, a boatman who has loved her from afar.
Seeing
The sequel to Blindness: the city holds an election where every ballot is cast blank, and the government's response reveals that democracy's greatest threat is its own defenders.
Miramar
At a faded pension in Alexandria kept by an old Greek woman, four men take turns telling the story of Zohra, the young country girl who works as the maid.
Death in Venice
Gustav von Aschenbach, an ageing German writer on holiday in Venice, becomes infatuated with a beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, and stays on as cholera spreads through the city.
The Moon Is Down
An invading army takes a small coastal mining town in an unnamed northern country almost without a shot, and its colonel tries to run it peacefully through the town's mayor.
Henry IV
A play: twenty years after a fall from his horse at a costume pageant, a wealthy Italian still believes he is the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, and his old circle arrives with a doctor to try to cure him.
Journey to the East
H. H., a musician, recalls his part in a secret League's pilgrimage to the East, a journey across time and imagination that fell apart when the humble servant Leo vanished.
Doctor Faustus
A German biographer writes during the Reich's collapse about his friend, a composer who contracted for twenty-four years of genius in a Leipzig brothel.
The True Deceiver
In a snowbound coastal village, a calculating young woman sets out to win the trust and money of a reclusive children's book illustrator, and each woman ends up changing the other.
The Tartar Steppe
A young Italian officer is posted to a remote fortress on the edge of a desert where the enemy has been expected for a century, and he learns how to wait.
The Mother
In a remote Sardinian mountain village, the mother of the young parish priest learns that her son, for whom she gave up everything, is visiting a lonely woman at night.