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Title: All great, but don't miss MARIO AND THE MAGICIAN!!!
Review: The reviews here are all right on. This collection may be the best intro to the GREATEST 20th Century Author..(OK, you may not agree.) Much of Mann is difficult and dense,even for me, a longtime devotee. In this collection, start off with MARIO, a superior look at the sacred and profane. We find a German tourist and his young family in Italy going into a seemingly harmless carnival-type show. The author's portrait of the innocent young is itself worth the entire book,their enchantment at the acts,until an ugly mesmorist makes his appearance performing seemingly impossible tricks on members of the crowd. Slowly, the innocent crowd has been hooked, the children awed by the whole thing, until the final,inevitable end. Reading this,I thought,"Are there really people out there who can perform such acts?" Who knows, but this story is surely a classic,along with the six others, mainly described in other reviews.
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