Thomas Mann’s Overcoat

This novel seamlessly blends the intellectual musings of Thomas Mann with a Hungarian folktale exploring the boundaries of reality and fantasy.

In this captivating and whimsical novel, the German novelist and critic Thomas Mann is visiting his tailor, Klaus, to be measured for a new overcoat, but his mind is full of thoughts of his new novel and meditations on the state of Europe after World War I. His tailor, though, entraps him in wily dialogue with mysterious claims about angels threading a strand of their hair through all of God’s creations. Mann becomes further entangled with this provocative artisan through a mysterious dream in which he is asked to draft a contract for the Rights of Devils.

At the same time, the impoverished mother of five-year-old Marci Tamás, living in a tiny Hungarian village, struggles to find the little boy a winter coat. Marci has stopped growing, so the coat she finds--belonging to a former circus dwarf--should suffice for life. Only the coat has a life of its own, as Marci soon finds out. That’s not all: he discovers a mysterious little white elephant in the family courtyard, which no one else can see. Determined to save the family’s three piglets from being slaughtered, he enlists this strange creature in a daring collective escape.

Written by one of Hungary’s most audacious literary voices, Thomas Mann’s Overcoat is at once a homage to the great German novelist as well as an Ars Poetica that embraces excess, whimsy, and folk poetry and refuses the strictures of realism.

Writer, poet, and professor of literature and creative writing, István Vörös has published numerous plays, collections of poetry, short story collections, and books of essays. He is a noted translator from Czech, and his own work has so far appeared in more than twenty languages. Ottilie Mulzet was awarded the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 for her translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.