SOURCE: A review of The Magician, in the Kenyon Review, Vol. IX, No. 4, Autumn, 1947, pp. 616-21.

In the following review, Ruml considers Frank's examination in The Magician of the place of fate in human life, finding Frank's handling of his topic to amount to an insubstantial "gimmick. "

Bruno Frank is most concerned with irony and fate, not simple elements as people commonly think of them but rather multiplied, twisted and reversed. His characters might be anyone; you can call them universal or not people at all. Relationships between people are not important; relationships might as well not exist. People are important only in one relationship, and that is the relationship with fate, usually told by Frank in terms of an object which turns out to be a symbol of fate.

When a woman's suitcase is accidentally substituted for his own, a business man is first mentally seduced by...