Is it a novella or a short story? For the purposes of this list, definitely a short story and one which has everything, including a terrifying magic show. The narrator is a father on holiday from Vienna with his wife and two young children at a coastal resort in Southern Italy. His attention and anxieties are the familiar ones of the tourist. He wants his family to have a wonderful time, but a series of unpleasant incidents occur leave them uncomfortable and dissatisfied. They are not allowed to eat on the terrace, they are forced to move hotel, and their young daughter is upbraided for her behaviour. The incidents appear unconnected but are part of a social and political logic: nationalist, exclusionary, judgemental. This is Italy in the late 1920s, some years into the Fascist era. The second half of the story takes places on a single evening when the narrator and his family go to a magic show hoping for a different, lighter mood. The reader suspects that things will take a darker turn but not the ugly, amorphous form the turn will take.
First published in German as a novella in 1929. First published in English by Martin Secker, 1930. Collected in Mario and the Magician and Other Stories, Vintage, 2000
A Personal Anthology 