My English teacher told me I was ready for this when I was 15. It changed my life in so many ways and without my realising, pushed me into the career that I'm in. I've visited it again and again so many times.
Men as Gods; Gods as men. The magic of the Mediterranean and travelling and how we sometimes need to go away to come closer to understanding ourselves. Has always informed my dreams and still does. This book truely became a part of me.Deep down, I have always been Nicholas and I want Conchis to play with my mind as well.
Leant my first copy to my best friend 20 years ago and he's still got it and hasn't read it! Leant my second copy to an ex-girlfriend who never gave it back. Leant my third copy to someone who covered in with suntan lotion (you know who you are!).
Now, I wait with impatience for the day when my child becomes 15 and I say: I think you are ready for this now. ( )

* NO SPOILERS WERE USED IN THE WRITING OF THIS REVIEW! *

Individuals like Nicholas from the Magus are common among my generation of hedonistic urbanites: self-centered slackers out for themselves, with no morals or principles guiding their actions.

In the Magus, one such "modern" (read "self-centered") individual finds himself stuck on a small Greek island, where he becomes entangled in an eccentric millionaire's mysterious web of games and deceit.

I know many people like Nicholas, and I wish that this book were required reading on the road to adulthood! The lessons of love and selflessness that Fowles presents are priceless, and may otherwise take some people a lifetime to grasp. Not to mention the many other gems of wisdom making this a book to be read, and re-read, and re-read.. ( )

This is maybe the most popular of Fowles - an Oscar movie being written after it (Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn).
A maze of unanswered questions and unexpected happenings, that could drive anybody crazy; a game of a diabolic mind... with some twin sisters and a guy, on an exotic island in Greece. Another masterpiece of psychology, but a very captivating story in the same time. ( )

I obviously have not read this work again for over decade but the residue of its power in my mind and memory is undiminished. A brilliant delving into the nature of emotional (self-)deception and duplicity, and the potential illusoriness of the 'day world' when pitted against the machinations of the inner life: the fiction of the world is possibly only the sum of all inner lives but that greater and more objective than any of these solipsisms perhaps are the demands and the pull of the seeming abstractions, love and friendship. ( )

How hard it is to rate this book. I read it when I was 19. I desperately wanted to like it, to understand it, to succumb to it, to be initiated into something or other. Perhaps I succeeded, at least at times. I read it in the bathtub, in the park, on the bus, so I must have been carrying it around with me whereever I went. To show off, in some way? I knew the book was better than the movie. What I couldn't figure out was whether it was actually any good as a book. I still don't know. There's been a revised version, issued in the late '70's. I wonder. Life is short, but maybe not too short. ( )