CANR
WORK TITLE: TYLL
WORK NOTES:
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CITY: Berlin
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COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: Austrian
LAST VOLUME: CANR 288
http://www.randomhouse.com/book/237249/f-by-daniel-kehlmann
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 13, 1975, in West Munich, West Germany (now Germany); immigrated to Austria, 1981; has German and Austrian citizenship; son of Michael Kehlmann and Dagmar Mettler; children: one son.
EDUCATION:Attended University of Vienna.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. New York University, New York, NY, writer in residence at Deutsches Haus, 2006; also lecturer at European universities, including Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, University of Weisbaden, and University of Göttingen; New York University, visiting scholar in the Department of German, also held the Eberhard Berent Chair. Fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, 2016-17.
MEMBER:Mainzer Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur; the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
AWARDS:Förderpreis des Kulturkreises der deutschen Wirtschaft, 1997, for Beerholms Vorstellung; Candide Award, 2005; Konrad Adenauer Stiftung prize, 2006; Heimito von Doderer prize, 2006; Kleist prize, 2006; WELT literature prize, 2007; Grand Prix du Livre, 2007; Per Olof Enquist prize, 2008; Thomas Mann prize, 2008; Nestroy Prize, 2012; Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis, 2018; Frank-Schirrmacher-Preis, 2018; Anton Wildgans Prize, 2019; Schubart Literaturpreis, 2019.
WRITINGS
Also published the lecture “Diese sehr ernsten Scherze,” Wallstein Verlag, 2003; the play Die Geister in Princeton, 2011; and the play Der Mentor, 2012. Contributor to German-language periodicals. Books have been translated in several languages, including Measuring the World, translated into forty or more languages.
The short story “True Blue” was filmed for the PBS television series American Playhouse, 1982; Gardener’s Dog was adapted for film by Jerry Wagner and released by Twentieth Century-Fox, 1985; The Riverboat Gang was adapted for television by ABC-TV and broadcast as an ABC Afterschool Special. The novel Die Vermessung der Welt was adapted as a film and released in theaters as Die Vermessung Der Welt: Das Buch Zum Film in 2012.
SIDELIGHTS
Daniel Kehlmann was born in West Munich, Germany, and raised in Vienna, Austria, where he later attended a Jesuit college. He made his literary debut in his early twenties with the novel Beerholms Vorstellung, which brought him acclaim and a German award, the Förderpreis des Kulturkreises der deutschen Wirtschaft. He has authored several more novels as well as short fiction. Die Vermessung der Welt, which appeared in English as Measuring the World, became an international best seller and established Kehlmann’s reputation as a major literary talent.
The book follows the exploits of nineteenth-century scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician Carl Gauss. In the novel, von Humboldt persuades Gauss to join him first at a party in Berlin and then in an expedition across Russia to the Ural Mountains. Kehlmann then relates some of the adventures each character had prior to their meeting, in alternating chapters, and employs what has been described as magical realism to set the tone of his story.
London Guardian contributor Luke Harding observed that Measuring the World is “the kind of thing Gabriel Garcia Marquez might have written had he been born in Stuttgart.” Several reviewers noted the novel’s freshness and humor, as well as the author’s willingness to address serious themes. “In a bonfire of stereotypes, the German-language historical novel roared back to comic life with a crackle of jokes, satire, action, and pathos,” wrote London Independent contributor Boyd Tonkin in assessing the overarching importance of the novel. Ken Alder, writing in American Scientist, called the book “a marvelous novel, a wry meditation on the idea that because there is more than one way to measure the world, there is more than one way to create it anew.” This story, noted the reviewer, “will speak to anyone who has tried to make sense of the world.” Times Literary Supplement contributor Marco Roth also commented on the depth beneath the book’s entertaining surface. Noting Kehlmann’s fascination with elements of popular culture such as The Simpsons and The Sopranos, Roth wrote that, by contrast, Measuring the World is “suffused with irony-inflected, retro-eighteenth-century classicism. It is as though [Kehlmann] wants to belong to the same Enlightenment era as his characters, or that he wants to assert that the differences between their era and ours are only about degrees of progress rather than modes of thought. His style doesn’t aim to capture the feeling of the past so much as make that past immediate.” The novel, concluded Roth, “suggests that German science has its origins in a complex Teutonic anxiety: the desire for and fear of freedom that includes the fear and thrill of not being a German at all.”
Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, called the book a “heady historical novel.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor described Kehlmann’s effort as “a wonderfully entertaining depiction of an era, but, more importantly, a warm, playful portrait of two delightfully improbable men,” going on to call the book “brilliant.” A reviewer for Publishers Weekly observed: “The narrative is notable for its brisk pacing, lively prose and wry humor.” Measuring the World was translated into at least forty languages and became one of the best-selling novels in the world within its first decade of publication. It also was the best-selling German-language novel in twenty years.
The overwhelming success of Measuring the World prompted the English translation of another Kehlmann novel, Ich und Kaminski, as Me and Kaminski. The book satirizes the trends of celebrity worship and journalism as entertainment. The “me” of the title is the narrator of the story, Sebastian Zöllner, a mediocre but egotistical critic who becomes obsessed with writing a tell-all biography of reclusive painter Manuel Kaminski, who is, at this point, nearly blind and living in a remote Alpine village with his daughter Miriam. Zöllner believes that this book will make him rich and famous, and he goes to absurd lengths to get his story.
Some reviewers deemed Me and Kaminski a slighter book than Measuring the World, but enjoyable nonetheless. Tonkin, writing in the London Independent, thought the novel relies too heavily on extremes and that Kehlmann’s characters are “cut from far too broad a cloth.” Still, the reviewer praised the episodes of zany comedy, which include Zöllner forcing the shy artist “into excruciating encounters with the chic Berlin art scene,” and an awkward reunion with his long-lost muse. Though Quarterly Conversations contributor Ryan Michael found much to commend in Me and Kaminski, the reviewer noted several less-than-original elements in the book. Its theme, said Williams, echoes that of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, and a key moment of epiphany is “nearly identical to the climax of Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral.’” This “symbolically leaden passage” in Me and Kaminski, Williams commented, “amounts to a disastrous misstep.”
Several other critics offered favorable reviews. Admiring Kehlmann’s skeptical view of the biography industry, London Telegraph contributor Jake Kerridge called the book a “sparkling and consistently amusing comedy, by turns broad and sophisticated.” In the London Observer, Phillip Oltermann noted that Me and Kaminski “satirises the biographer’s egomania with viciousness and accuracy. Ultimately, what unites Zöllner’s disastrous attempt at a biography and Kaminski’s increasingly sketchy paintings is the fear that the things that matter in life will forever remain on the periphery of our attention. In that sense, Me and Kaminski is a philosophical book.” London Guardian contributor Andrew Motion focused on the central irony of the novel: that “Kaminski and Zollner [sic] start … as almost-opposites, and end up realizing they have a remarkable amount in common.” This conclusion is a bleak one, the reviewer added, “but, in the steely comedy of Kehlmann’s narrative, one that feels cathartic almost to the extent of seeming delightful.”
Finding the symbolism in the novel to be, at times, “overly transparent,” San Francisco Chronicle contributor Kim Schmidt wrote: “Kehlmann’s critique of celebrity, of fame and the ugliness of self-promotion holds strong. In the end, Me and Kaminski is Kehlmann’s comment on where art, fame and truth intersect.” Joanne Wilkinson, writing in Booklist, described the novel as “delightfully comic.” A writer for Kirkus Reviews called it “a sort of European intellectual version of the buddy picture … smartly entertaining, if not entirely convincing.”
Ruhm: Ein Roman in Neun Geschichten, published in English as Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes, consists of nine linked stories that explore the theme of notoriety and shifting identities within the web of twenty-first-century communications technologies. In the first story, a boring computer technician, Ebling, buys a cell phone and is mistakenly assigned the phone number of famous actor Ralf Tanner. Receiving Tanner’s calls, Ebling is slowly drawn into the actor’s life and is tempted to act in ways that he would not otherwise have done. Other stories concern similarly blurred identities; a writer, for example, turns out to be the best-selling Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, and a fence for stolen cars is none other than Satan himself. Asked by a New Statesman interviewer if the novel was a reaction to his own fame and success, Kehlmann said: “It might be, but I don’t think it’s the major incentive for the book. Yet the question of fame, of celebrity, and what it does to people, how it distorts their self-image, is a question that has always interested me.”
Some critics called the novel a thoughtful and entertaining look at fame, identity, and connection. “Unflashy, cerebral, quietly excellent, Fame is good enough (and short enough) to reread almost at once, when the skill in construction becomes even clearer,” remarked Phil Baker in London’s Sunday Times. “Highly current in our Facebook and YouTube world, it is a near-perfect performance.” In a review posted on the Goethe Institute Web site, Sabine Tenta observed that in this book Kehlmann “explodes the unity of space,” showing how “e-mails and mobile phones by-pass all distances in real time” and encourage lying. The book, wrote Tenta, is “full of subtle irony and fine humour: artfully woven, polished and highly suspenseful.” London Guardian contributor Edmund Gordon praised the book overall but noted: “However skillfully it is executed, one cannot help doubting the absolute sincerity of Kehlmann’s attack on the forms of modern celebrity,” given that it is billed as a novel rather than a short story collection, which “makes it more marketable.” Gordon added: “This mild deception clearly doesn’t affect the simple elegance of Kehlmann’s writing or the brilliance of his wit,” but it “suggests a level of collusion with that bitch villain of his new book, Publicity.”
Tim Mohr, writing in the New York Times Book Review, saw the novel’s structure as less problematic than its content, saying: “While the overall plan integrating the episodes may be clever, Kehlmann traffics in mundane and predictable ironies within the stories themselves. … Fame may be intended as a lavish joke, with the title meant to clue us in to Kehlmann’s disdain for the sorts of figures he takes down a peg here.” He also found that “Kehlmann betrays a navel-gazing streak, forcing us to watch him write and to congratulate him on his clever writerly tricks.” Others, though, had more positive things to say about the book. Library Journal contributor K.H. Cumiskey called it “engrossing, complex, and humorous,” and Booklist contributor Carol Haggas deemed it a “wickedly clever novel” in which the author “showcases a flair for devious satire.” A Publishers Weekly commentator summed it up as a “brilliant study of the fragility and interconnectedness of life,” with Kehlmann showing himself to be “a worthy heir” to Paul Bowles and Albert Camus.
In his unsettling and elusive novel F, Kehlmann once again infuses a seemingly straightforward narrative with the faintest traces of magic and fable. The plot of F is catalyzed by Arthur Friedland, a middling writer who whiles away his time penning novels that end up submerged in publishers’ slush piles, dejected and forgotten. Arthur periodically stirs himself from his creative torpor to entertain his three sons, Ivan, Eric, and Martin. One afternoon, Arthur—desperately seeking some way to occupy the attentions of his progeny—takes them to see a flamboyant old hypnotist who answers to the grandiloquent title of “The Great Lindemann.” Arthur boasts to the wizened hypnotist that he is impervious to his glamours. Lindemann promptly proves this boast false and forces Arthur to—under hypnosis—disclose that he is deeply dissatisfied with his life and wishes to escape to start it anew. Shaken by these revelations, Arthur takes his sons home, hastily empties his scant bank account, and uses his meager funds to finance his long-desired escape. He vanishes from the lives of his sons, leaving them without a parent and encumbered with feelings of abandonment that hang over them heavily. The remainder of F explores the bizarre interpersonal dynamics between Arthur’s sons and chronicles their confused, rudderless lives. Kehlmann describes Martin’s life as an atheistic priest, painter Ivan’s surrender to artistic mediocrity and forgery, and money manager Eric’s increasing deviousness and neurosis. Arthur eventually returns to the narrative in F, though only in a secondary, detached way. The three brothers discover that their long-lost father has become the best-selling author of a semi-autobiographical novel featuring an enigmatic character named “F.” Arthur’s opus, they find, is a paean to cynicism and existential despair, and its bilious contents have led to a rash of suicides across Germany. Arthur and his sons are all lost men discontent with themselves and the world, and unable to locate meaning in either the relationships they form or the work they do. F may seem calculatedly inscrutable, but its central thematic preoccupation is easy to discern. The novel is a sustained study of an irrepressibly human impulse: the yearning to find meaning in the world.
Julius Purcell observed, in his Financial Times assessment of F, that “a mind-bending circularity is the basis of this compelling read.” Other reviewers offered similar observations in their reviews of F. Many commended Kehlmann for crafting a complex novel whose embedded symbols and subtle narrative mechanics demanded much from readers, taxing them and demanding they engage with the material. Writing for NPR Online, Ellah Allfrey noted: “This is a book for the reader who doesn’t mind working hard. … Kehlmann’s prose is sophisticated and often dense, his musings on religion, art and life are intellectually rigorous, and his plotting masterful in the linking of the story’s separate narratives with overlaps that, when revealed, surprise and shock the reader.” While most reviewers could not help but comment on the myriad devices Kehlmann deployed in F to transform the novel from a routine tale of familial dysfunction to a dreamlike and surreal reading experience, some made it clear that the author’s greatest achievements lay in his demanding study of a set of related thematic preoccupations. A Publishers Weekly contributor, for instance, called F “both bizarre and bleakly humorous, a slim manifesto on the divide between people’s dreams and their destinies.”
In his horror novel titled You Should Have Left, Kehlmann tells the story of a screenwriter and his family who rent a holiday house in the the mountains only to find out they are being haunted. The unnamed scriptwriter narrates the tale and initially lauds his surroundings, thinking it is a great place to start the sequel to the successful movie Besties that he wrote. The writer, however, is a worrier and finds plenty to be uneasy about, including the dangerous road leading to the house, where he, his actor wife Susan, and their four-year-0ld daughter appear to be, for the most part, comfortably ensconced.
Despite his high hopes for the retreat spurring on his creativity, the writer finds himself distracted. His script notebook has less dialogue and more musings about the writer’s concerns, from the difficulties raising his daughter to the problems within his marriage. He also writes extensively about not moving forward with the script’s story. Meanwhile, the disagreements and arguments with his wife are increasing. He begins to have strange dreams about a strange would. These dreams, however, soon must compete with strange and troubling phenomena he experiences when awake. For example, his reflection disappears in the house windows and around the house photographs go missing and then strangely reappear. Eventually he is warned by a neighbor in the village to leave the house, and the writer soon begins to write in his script notebook about his growing fears and the feeling that he and his family should flee.
“It’s certainly a narrative tour de force: as Kehlmann deftly demonstrates, a good writer can get his readers to believe pretty much anything,” wrote Ulf Zimmermann in World Literature Today. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called You Should Have Left “a beautifully crafted exercise in terror,” adding later: “This novel is, in many ways, a classic haunted-house tale.”
For his next novel, Tyll, Kehlmann draws from a famous German folktale featuring a wandering trickster named Till Eulenspiegel. In the novel, Tyll Ulenspiegel is traveling around 17th-century Germany along with his company of entertainers in a country that has been devastated by the Thirty Years’ War. The novel, however, begins with a look at Till’s childhood, from his father’s execution for witchcraft to Till’s running off from his village with the girl Nele.
In the book’s eight episodes, Tyll encounters various notable people and events in German history as he and his troupe become well known for their performances. Noting the book’s various episodes resemble folktales, a Publishers Weekly contributor commented that “some [stories] … put the canny Tyll in the foreground, while others feature him only as a witness to the main action.” Commenting on advancing the trickster’s story from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, Kehlmann told Publishers Weekly Online contributor J.W. McCormack: “I wanted Tyll to be a kind of guide for the reader into the hell of the early modernity, when there existed nothing but superstition—a world comprised of death, miracles, and dark magic.” For example, Tyll witnesses the utter destruction that war has brought to the villages of Germany. “Kehlmann is eager to point out the horrors of war,” wrote a contributor to the Modern Novel blog.
The novel includes real-life historical figures, such as the German scholar and mathematician Adam Olearius and Dr. Kircher who is based on the German Jesuit scholar and polymath Athanasius Kircher. Tyll eventually becomes the palace fool of Frederick V of the Palatinate. Frederick’s wife is the Scottish Elizabeth Stuart, whose exile following her husband’s death from an infection leads her to be called the Winter Queen of Bohemia. The stories also include a range of characters who seem to have come straight out of old folktales, such as Origenes, a talking donkey. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Tyll “richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Fisher, Jaimey, and Barbara Mennel, editors, Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, Rodopi (New York, NY), 2010.
Rickes, Joachim, Die Metamorphosen des Teufels bei Daniel Kehlmann: “Sagen Sie Karl Ludwig zu Mir,” Königshausen & Neumann (Würzburg, Germany), 2010.
PERIODICALS
American Scientist, May 1, 2007, Ken Alder, review of Measuring the World.
Booklist, November 1, 2006, Ray Olson, review of Measuring the World, p. 29; October 15, 2008, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Me and Kaminski, p. 23; August 1, 2010, Carol Haggas, review of Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes, p. 24; July 1, 2014, Joanne Wilkinson, review of F, p. 28.
Bookseller, May 25, 2007, Keith Smith, review of Measuring the World, p. 13.
Entertainment Weekly, November 10, 2006, Wook Kim, review of Measuring the World, p. 89.
Financial Times, December 6, 2008, Anna Metcalfe, author profile; November 14, 2014, Julius Purcell, review of F.
Guardian (London, England), April 14, 2007, Giles Foden, review of Measuring the World, p. 16; October 27, 2007, review of Measuring the World, p. 19; November 1, 2008, Andrew Motion, review of Me and Kaminski, p. 10; September 19, 2010, Edmund Gordon, review of Fame.
Harper’s, November, 2006, John Leonard, review of Measuring the World, p. 81.
Independent (London, England), October 31, 2008, Boyd Tonkin, review of Me and Kaminski.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2006, review of Measuring the World, p. 867; September 15, 2008, review of Me and Kaminski; June 15, 2014, review of F; May 1, 2017, review of You Should Have Left; November 15, 2019, review of Tyll.
Library Journal, October 1, 2008, Karen Walton Morse, review of Me and Kaminski, p. 58; September 1, 2010, K.H. Cumiskey, review of Fame, p. 101; July 1, 2014, James Coan, review of F, p. 76.
Nation, April 30, 2007, Mark M. Anderson, review of Measuring the World, p. 34.
Natural History, July 1, 2007, Laurence A. Marschall, review of Measuring the World.
New Statesman, December 1, 2008, review of Me and Kaminski, p. 54; October 25, 2010, author profile, p. 49.
New York Times Book Review, November 5, 2006, Tom LeClair, review of Measuring the World; October 3, 2010, Tim Mohr, review of Fame, p. 19; October 31, 2014, Joseph Salvatore, review of F.
Observer (London, England), April 1, 2007, review of Measuring the World, p. 24; October 21, 2007, review of Measuring the World, p. 28; December 14, 2008, Phillip Oltermann, review of Me and Kaminski, p. 27.
Philadelphia Inquirer, January 17, 2007, Carlin Romano, review of Measuring the World.
Publishers Weekly, September 25, 2006, review of Measuring the World, p. 43; August 18, 2008, review of Me and Kaminski, p. 37; June 14, 2010, review of Fame, p. 31; June 16, 2014, review of F, p. 52; April 17, 2017, review of You Should Have Left, p. 40; October 21, 20198, review of Tyll, p. 51.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 17, 2006, review of Measuring the World, p. F13.
San Francisco Chronicle, December 2, 2008, Kim Schmidt, review of Me and Kaminski.
Sunday Times (London, England), September 12, 2010, Phil Baker, review of Fame, p. 47.
Telegraph (London, England), October 24, 2008, Jake Kerridge, review of Me and Kaminski; September 24, 2010, Jake Kerridge, author interview.
Times (London, England), December 14, 2008, Tom Deveson, review of Me and Kaminski.
Times Literary Supplement, December 15, 2006, Marco Roth, review of Measuring the World; September 10, 2010, Alexander Starritt, review of Fame, p. 24.
Washington Post Book World, November 26, 2006, Ron Charles, review of Measuring the World, p. 6.
Washington Times, February 15, 2009, John Greenya, review of Me and Kaminski; November 19, 2010, John Greenya, Fame, p. B6.
Weekly Standard, February 23, 2009, Susanne Klingenstein, review of Me and Kaminski.
World Literature Today, January 1, 2008, Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr, review of Measuring the World; September-October, 2018, Ulf Zimmermann, review of You Should Have Left, p. 76.
ONLINE
A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com/ (September 23, 2010), Ellen Wernecke, review of Fame.
Collected Miscellany, http://collectedmiscellany.com/ (January 4, 2011), Kevin Holtsberry, review of Fame.
Complete Review, http://www.complete-review.com/ (February 20, 2011), author profile.
Daniel Kehlmann, http://www.kehlmann.com (December 17, 2019).
Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City, UT), http://www.deseretnews.com/ (November 19, 2006), Dennis Lythgoe, review of Measuring the World.
Fantastic Fiction, http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/ (February 20, 2011), brief biography.
Goethe Institute, http://www.goethe.de/ (December 26, 2006), author profile; (June 24, 2009) Sabine Tenta, review of Ruhm: Ein Roman in Neun Geschichten.
Guardian (London, England), http://books.guardian.co.uk/ (July 19, 2006), Luke Harding, review of Measuring the World; (November 15, 2014), Philip Oltermann, “Interview: Daniel Kehlmann: ‘German Writers Have Been Taught to Hide Their Humor.”
Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (June 10, 2017), Eileen Battersby, “You Should Have Left Review: Welcome to a Hall of Mirrors.”
Modern Novel blog, https://www.themodernnovelblog.com/ (December 29, 2017), “Daniel Kehlmann: Tyll [Till].”
New York Sun Online, http://www.nysun.com/ (November 22, 2006), Benjamin Lytal, review of Measuring the World.
NPR Online, http://www.npr.org/ (August 20, 2014), Ellah Allfrey, review of F.
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (June 24, 2009), Ryan Michael Williams, review of Me and Kaminski.
Passa Porta, https://www.passaporta.be/en/ (April 11, 2018), “Daniel Kehlmann.”
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/ (October 25, 2019), J.W. McCormack, “Daniel Kehlmann Forays Into Folklore with Tyll.”
Random House, http://www.randomhouse.com/ (February 20, 2011), author profile.
Salon, http://www.salon.com/ (August 27, 2014), Jonathan Franze, author interview.
San Francisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com/ (November 12, 2006), Aaron Britt, review of Measuring the World.
Washington Post Book World, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (November 26, 2006), Ron Charles, review of Measuring the World; (October 17, 2010), Gregory Leon Miller, review of Fame.
Words without Borders, http://wordswithoutborders.org/ (April 6, 2009), Arnon Grunberg, author interview.
Daniel Kehlmann
Germany (b.1975)
Daniel Kehlmann has both German and Austrian citizenship. His work Die Vermessung der Welt (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway as Measuring the World, 2006) is the biggest selling novel in the German language since Patrick Süskind's Perfume was released in 1985. Kehlmann's works, and in particular Die Vermessung der Welt, are heavily influenced by Latin American magical realism and represent a dramatic shift from the goals of the influential Group 47. He was awarded the Heimito von Doderer prize for the novel.
New Books
February 2020
(hardback)
Tyll
Novels
Measuring the World (2006)
Me and Kaminski (2008)
Fame (2010)
F (2014)
Tyll (2020)
Plays
The Mentor (2017)
Christmas Eve (2017)
Daniel Kehlmann Forays Into Folklore with 'Tyll'
Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, Tyll, is based on a German folktale about a wandering trickster, set against the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War
By J.W. McCormack | Oct 25, 2019
Comments
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan
Daniel Kehlmann
In Daniel Kehlmann’s bestselling 2005 historical adventure story, Measuring the World, the gentleman botanist Alexander von Humboldt travels to the Amazon and painstakingly classifies every flower bud, poison, parasite, and bend of the Orinoco River, certain that the grand unity of the cosmos is waiting to be revealed under his microscope. Exasperated at Humboldt’s completism, his French sidekick Bonpland asks, “Did one always have to be so German?”
Though born in Munich in 1975, Kehlmann happens to be Austrian, the son of a Viennese theater director. His novels and plays are exactly the kind of corpus one might expect from a post-Enlightenment-era German-language writer transposed to the present, straddling both playful modernity and classical romanticism. Kleist would approve of his taste for quasihistorical folktales, Thomas Mann would be quite at home in Kehlmann’s frequent juxtaposition of Enlightenment-era logic and superstitious barbarism, and his baroque, puzzle-box approach to psychology and philosophy would appeal to Hölderlin. (It is no accident that Kehlmann happens has netted the Kleist, Thomas Mann, and Friedrich Hölderlin prizes in Germany.) And yet, Kehlmann’s books are page-turners, running the gamut from picaresque and family chronicles to gothic horror. They are nothing if not approachable and generous with their pleasures, even as they bound from genre to genre, coalescing into an ultimately impossible-to-categorize vision of contemporary literature, its past, and its potential.
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In person, Kehlmann is gregarious, charming, self-effacing, and disarmingly fascinated by nearly everything; upon meeting at a cavernous restaurant a stone’s throw from NYU, where he is a visiting scholar in the German department, our interview lapsed into considerations of the science behind spotting dragons (“Where you don’t see the dragon, that’s where it is, because it’s hiding”), the vogue for “nonfiction novels” (Kehlmann prefers Emmanuel Carrère and forerunner Max Frisch to Knausgaard), American gun violence, and the controversy engulfing the new Joker movie (“It’s apparently easier on the conscience to ban fiction than guns”). Despite his work’s perceived Teutonism, Kehlmann maintains that he came slowly to German history and describes his earliest literary heroes as coming from the U.S., Russia, and Latin America. As a teenager, he read everything from Nabokov to Pet Sematary, and by age 20 he had already completed his first novel, the as-yet-untranslated Beerholms Vorstellung, written from the perspective of a stage magician. That novel was followed by Mahlers Zeit, the story of a frustrated scientist, and Me and Kaminski, in which the influence of Nabokov is evidenced in the story of a journalist who becomes increasingly enveloped by his subject, the oddball painter Manuel Kaminski. Then came Measuring the World, translated into English in 2006 by the late Carol Brown Janeway, the legendary Knopf editor whom he describes as family and who worked with Kehlmann to bring his novels into English during her summer holidays.
A success in nearly every language it appeared in, Measuring the World established Kehlmann’s light touch regarding subject matter that would otherwise be encumbered with mind-boggling complexity. Tracing the origins of modern science through the diametrically opposed genius of curmudgeonly mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and that of indefatigable natural scientist Humboldt, and featuring supporting characters such as Louis Daguerre, Thomas Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant, the novel extracts a bracingly funny and altogether thrilling human story from the birth of science as we know it, in the pocket of time just before “people would go up in balloons and measure off distances on magnetic scales... and work out distances by the diminution of electrical intensity.” Like many of Kehlmann’s novels, Measuring the World went on to become a movie, with the author cowriting the screenplay.
His reputation—and bankability—firmly established, Kehlmann’s next two books veered toward formal experimentalism: F deconstructs the family chronicle with healthy doses of hypnotism, forgery, religious mysticism, and overlapping narratives, while Fame follows the ramifications of a series of calls to a wrong number into nine interconnected stories of writers, their creations, movie stars, and mistaken identities. During this time, Kehlmann also wrote plays; 2012’s The Mentor was staged in London’s West End with F. Murray Abraham in the lead.
All of which brings us to Tyll (Pantheon, Feb. 2020), almost certainly Kehlmann’s magnum opus. Taken from the well-known German folktale of a wandering trickster and infused with the detail of a painting by Bruegel the Elder, Tyll humanizes its hero, Tyll Ulenspiegel, while bringing him from the 13th century to the 17th. “I wanted Tyll to be a kind of guide for the reader into the hell of the early modernity, when there existed nothing but superstition—a world comprised of death, miracles, and dark magic,” Kehlmann says. As the Thirty Years’ War ravages the countryside, the acrobat and jack-of-all-trades Tyll roves with his company through flash points of European history, sometimes as protagonist and sometimes as observer. He witnesses, for starters, the exile of King Frederick of Bohemia, for whom Tyll becomes court jester; the rise of the Jesuits, who put Tyll’s heretical father to death; and the utter destruction of German villages at the hands of a soldiery run rampant.
Kehlmann describes the Thirty Years’ War as“a dark moment in European history,” noting that, as a result of the war, “50% of the civilian population of Northern Europe was wiped out.” As to why he chose to set his novel in this bleakest of periods, Kehlmann says it’s because he was frightened by it. He quotes his friend Jonathan Franzen as advising him that “when you have the strong feeling that there is something you shouldn’t write about, you should take it as a sign that you must.”
Just as Tyll is Kehlmann’s most ambitious work, it also had the longest gestation period—not that he didn’t put his time to good use. During a lull in its composition, he wrote the horror novella You Should Have Left (translated, like Tyll, by Ross Benjamin), about a screenwriter and his family who are menaced by a haunted rental high in the mountains. When he returned to Tyll, the world had changed with the election of Donald Trump, the devastation of Syria, and the newfound prevalence of “fake news”—all of which made their way, in some fashion, into the novel.
“In a sense,” Kehlmann says, “all news was fake because it was propaganda, as the public was flooded with pamphlets that claimed their enemies were in league with the devil, or that they had won battles that had actually been lost. It was a time of darkness and destruction, when all political order totally failed.” This synergy between past and present clearly hit a nerve: Tyll is being developed as a show for Netflix. (Meanwhile You Should Have Left is forthcoming from the horror movie giant Blumhouse, starring Kevin Bacon.)
Kehlmann considers the key to all his novels to be a sense of personal stakes. His personality—curious, scholarly, and intellectually good-humored—suffuses his work, whether modern, premodern, or altogether mythical. As for what Tyll has done for Kehlmann’s sense of the present, he says, “I feel more relaxed. This new dark age is really terrible. But we’ve survived worse.”
Recent work by J.W. McCormack has appeared in the Baffler, Bomb, Longreads, and the New York Times.
Daniel Kehlmann
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Daniel Kehlmann
Daniel Kehlmann, Frankfurt Book Fair 2017
Born
13 January 1975 (age 44)
Munich, Germany
Occupation
Writer
Nationality
German, Austrian
Notable works
Measuring the World
You Should Have Left
Website
www.kehlmann.com
Daniel Kehlmann (born 13 January 1975) is a German-language novelist and playwright of both Austrian and German nationality.[1] His novel Die Vermessung der Welt (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway as Measuring the World, 2006) is the best-selling book in the German language since Patrick Süskind's Perfume was released in 1985. According to The New York Times, it was the world's second best-selling novel in 2006.[2] All his subsequent novels reached the number one spot on Germany's Spiegel bestseller list and were translated into English. He collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Paul Reitter on Franzen's 2013 book The Kraus Project. Kehlmann's play The Mentor, translated by Christopher Hampton, opened at Theatre Royal, Bath, in April 2017 starring F. Murray Abraham and transferred to the London West End in July 2017.[3] In October 2017, his play Christmas Eve, also translated by Christopher Hampton, premiered at the Theatre Royal.[4] His novella You Should Have Left was adapted into a movie starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried.[5] Hi novel Tyll, which sold more than 600.000 copies in German alone[6] and is due to be published in the US in February 2020[7], is currently being adapted into a TV series by Netflix[8].
Contents
1
Life and career
2
Awards and honors
3
Works
3.1
Novels
3.2
Essays
3.3
Collected writings and short stories
3.4
Stage plays
3.5
Books available in English
4
Filmography
5
References
6
External links
Life and career[edit]
Kehlmann was born in Munich, the son of the television director Michael Kehlmann and the actress Dagmar Mettler.[9] His family moved to his father's hometown Vienna at the age of six. Kehlmann is partially of Jewish ancestry[10] and currently lives in New York City and Berlin.[11]
Since 2015, Kehlmann has successively held the Eberhard Berent Chair at New York University. He is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
2016-2017 he was a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.[12]
Awards and honors[edit]
2006 Kleist Prize
2007 WELT Literaturpreis
2007 Grand Prix du livre des dirigeants
2008 Thomas-Mann-Preis
2008 PO Enquist Pris
2010 Prix Cévennes du roman européen
2012 Nestroy Theatre Prize, Best play – Authors prize for Geister in Princeton
2018 Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis
2018 Frank-Schirrmacher-Preis
2019 Anton Wildgans Prize[13]
2019 Schubart Literaturpreis
Works[edit]
Novels[edit]
Beerholms Vorstellung. Deuticke Verlag 1997
Mahlers Zeit. Suhrkamp Verlag 1999
Ich und Kaminski. Suhrkamp 2003
Die Vermessung der Welt. Rowohlt Verlag 2005
Ruhm. Rowohlt 2009
F. Rowohlt 2013
Tyll. Rowohlt 2017
Essays[edit]
Wo ist Carlos Montúfar?. Rowohlt 2005
Diese sehr ernsten Scherze. Poetikvorlesungen. Wallstein Verlag 2007
Kommt, Geister. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen. Rowohlt 2015
Collected writings and short stories[edit]
Unter der Sonne. Deuticke 1998
Der fernste Ort. Suhrkamp 2001
Requiem für einen Hund. Matthes & Seitz 2008
Leo Richters Porträt. Rowohlt 2009
Lob: Über Literatur. Rowohlt 2010
Du hättest gehen sollen. Rowohlt 2016
Stage plays[edit]
Geister in Princeton (2011)
Der Mentor (2012)
Heilig Abend (2017)
Die Reise der Verlorenen (2018)
Books available in English[edit]
Measuring the World. A Novel. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. Pantheon 2006
Me and Kaminski. A Novel. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. Pantheon 2008
Fame. A Novel in Nine Stories. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. Pantheon 2010
F. A Novel. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. Pantheon 2014
You Should Have Left. A Novel. Translated by Ross Benjamin. Pantheon 2016
Christmas Eve. A Play. Translated by Christopher Hampton. Faber and Faber 2017
The Mentor. A Play. Translated by Christopher Hampton. Faber and Faber 2017
Filmography[edit]
Unter der Sonne (dir. Baran Bo Odar, 2006)
Ruhm (dir. Isabel Kleefeld, 2012)
Measuring the World (dir. Detlev Buck, 2012)
Me and Kaminski (dir. Wolfgang Becker, 2015)
You Should Have Left (dir. David Koepp, 2018)
Daniel Kehlmann
Sun 04.11.2018 20:00 - 21:30 Interview, Lecture
Last tickets
Location
Passa Porta
Category
Interview, Lecture
Price
pre-sale: €8/6 at the door: €10/8
Language
in English
Tickets
Meet the author
The meetings with writers at Passa Porta, prepared with passion, courage and thoroughness, are more than simply the presentation of literary works. We seek to achieve a genuine connection between writer and reader, and among readers themselves.
Go to overview
Passa Porta has a special treat for you! Since German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann traded Berlin for New York, he has rarely appeared at European venues. Passa Porta nevertheless managed to snare him for a conversation about Tyll. In his latest novel, Kehlmann tackles a historical subject, the first time since his international bestseller Measuring the World.
A literary lion
‘My favourite German novelist’, Ian McEwan said about Daniel Kehlmann. Now, whether Kehlmann needed that recommendation is questionable. His sixth novel, Measuring the World, was published in 46 countries and sold 8 million copies. His work has won, among others, the Candide Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Kehlmann is also the author of poetry and theatre texts. In the meantime, leading theatre and opera houses are tripping over each other to attract Kehlmann, and his novella You Should Have Left is currently being filmed with Hollywood stars Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried.
Tyll
In his latest novel, Tyll, Daniel Kehlmann takes readers back to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), one of the bloodiest conflicts on German soil. Their guide is Till Uilenspiegel, the legendary entertainer and provocateur.
Till is left to fend for himself when his father, a poor miller with an interest in black magic, is sentenced to death by the Church. The young Till is forced to flee. He travels through Europe, which is ravaged by wars of religion and where everyone is being driven from hearth and home. Including Frederik, Duke of Bohemia, the ‘Winter King’ who, after a reign of only one winter, is forced to leave Prague and who seeks refuge in The Hague.
Till becomes his court jester and gets on particularly well with Frederik’s wife, Liz, who like himself is a rebel spirit with a pronounced sense of justice. Tyll is anything but a dry record of historical facts. Kehlmann has built on the momentum of Measuring the World to create with Tyll a modern roman à tiroirs full of surprising characters and insights in flawless prose.
‘The best book that he has written. A brutal, modern, romantic epic.’
Der Spiegel
‘Kehlmann’s best novel.’
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
ORG: Passa Porta, L&M Books, Querido
Interview
Daniel Kehlmann: ‘German writers have been taught to hide their humour’
Philip Oltermann
The literary superstar on writing a novel about families, for people who don’t like novels about families
@philipoltermann
Sat 15 Nov 2014 08.30 GMT
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 13.06 GMT
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'Intriguing phenomenon' … Daniel Kehlmann. Photograph: Focus/eyevine
W
hen Daniel Kehlmann was four years old, he went to watch his father, one of Germany’s most sought-after theatre directors, lead a rehearsal at Vienna’s Josefstadt theatre. A chandelier was lowered from the ceiling, then raised again until it disappeared through a hole in the roof. “I didn’t know that this took place every night; I really thought it had happened for the first time and only for me. I was shocked and happy. No performance has measured up since that morning.” Kehlmann doesn’t offer an explanation for the anecdote, but two interpretations suggest themselves: for him, art needs to feel a little bit like magic; and a moment in the spotlight can be very brief indeed. They lift you up, but they can pull you down at any moment.
Kehlmann told the story about the chandelier in a controversial speech at the Salzburg festival five years ago. His fourth novel, Measuring the World, had just become a bestseller, and he was German literature’s bright young thing. But instead of enjoying his new role, Kehlmann lambasted the “formulaic avant-gardism” of the contemporary German drama scene: its obsession with elevating the director’s interpretation over the author’s intention had ruined the career of his father, who died in 2005, and who believed that directors should remain servants to the text. His father’s struggles, Kehlmann now says, sitting outside a cafe by the River Spree in central Berlin, taught him a lesson. “It’s very easy to fall out of fashion. So much of the culture industry is about vague agreements. I experienced that strongly as a child. It taught me a certain degree of caution and scepticism when it comes to success.”
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Kehlmann is an intriguing phenomenon. Born in Munich and raised in Austria, he is a literary superstar in the German-speaking world, whose books and speeches not only command long reviews and responses in the high-brow sections of the newspapers, but also shift copies. Measuring the World sold 3m copies in Germany alone and roughly twice that worldwide, having been translated into more than 40 languages; a film version was released in 2012. Still only 39, he has published six novels and three collections of essays, as well as a couple of novellas, film scripts and plays. His novels are on the school syllabus in Germany.
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Yet he also seems in a different orbit from the rest of the German literary scene. While he professes that the German language is “the source of life in all my books”, and remains quick to cite his debt to the works of Goethe, Schiller and Schopenhauer as well as lesser-known writers such as Leo Perutz and Heimito von Doderer, his contemporary points of reference lie elsewhere. His eyes light up when he talks about Latin American magical realism, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace.
Kehlmann’s novels pursue big philosophical ideas, which may strike British readers as very Germanic: the main character of his debut novel Mahler’s Time, published when he was only 22, was a “12-year-old Platonist”; his followup dealt with a scientist who believed he could slow down time; and his latest book looks at the radical edges of the theory of “philosophy of mind”. But his novels arrive at those ideas in a very un-German way.
Measuring the World, a fictionalised twin-biography of the 19th-century scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Gauss, evokes the era of Weimar classicism, when men in frock coats and wigs used to debate in coffee houses. Some readers, he concedes, may have bought it because they were flattered to be reminded of Germany’s role in the Enlightenment’s avant garde.
In fact, he says, it was intended as the antithesis of that – “a comedy about German high culture, about the German cult of genius”. “I have met people who didn’t want to read Measuring the World because they thought it was a serious, educated, self-important book about intellectual history. It has gained an aura that is the very opposite of what it really is, and I do regret that a bit. I also think it’s problematic that it is now on the school syllabus, because, in reality, it’s a parody about how we deal with educational values.”
Kehlmann’s new book, F, does with the conventions of the family saga what his world bestseller did to the historical novel. It starts with another magical chandelier moment: struggling author Arthur Friedland takes his three sons to see a hypnotist in a circus tent. Soon after, he leaves his young family behind to start a lucrative career as an author in the Paulo Coelho mould, peddling cod philosophy to the masses. Twenty years later, the eldest son Martin is a Catholic priest even though he doesn’t believe in God and his half-brothers Eric and Iwan are conmen – one dealing in finance, the other in art. Whether the letter in the title stands for “family”, “fate” or “fraud” remains unclear.
“I wanted to write a novel about families for people who don’t like novels about families. Conventional family sagas bore me: you have to wade through pages and pages of family pre-history – uncles, aunts, grandparents – when you’re only really interested in the main hero. I wanted to parody that kind of information overkill.”
One of the chapters in F slides down the Friedland family tree at a breakneck pace: entire lifespans are dispatched in a single paragraph. Within five pages we’re in the age of Napoleon, another 10 pages on life is so monotonous that three generations in a row are summed up with exactly the same words: “He never left his manor. Sometimes people passed nearby, they came from other places and wanted to go elsewhere. He did not want that.”
Kehlmann laughs when reminded of that passage. “Personally, I thought that was one of the funniest things I’ve ever come up with” – though experience has taught him that readers rarely share the author’s taste in punchlines. Getting the section past his editors was a struggle, he says: most of them assumed they were dealing with a printing error that needed correcting.
Kehlmann is a keen student of the Simpsons. Photograph: Reuters/Fox
A serious interest in the mechanics of good comedy is another aspect that puts Kehlmann slightly at odds with traditional literature in his native tongue. He admires Wodehouse (“a Shakespearean talent for language”) and remains a keen student of The Simpsons (“particularly seasons eight to 15”). “There’s a scene in ‘The City of New York vs Homer Simpson’ in which Homer has this incredible thirst, but the street vendor sells only bottles of Mountain Dew and these disgusting-looking cans of crab juice. Homer looks at the crab juice, gags, and then says: ‘I’ll have the crab juice.’ There’s no pause after that, no break for us to laugh. So much of good comedy is all about pace: that’s what I learned from The Simpsons.”
Most contemporary German fiction lives up to its own stereotype in that respect, he says: “It’s not that we don’t have good comic authors in German, but comic authors don’t tend to be included in the official canon. The greatest comic dramatist of the 19th century, Johann Nestroy, is really only known in Austria, and even fantastic comic writers such as Max Goldt and Sven Regener have a hard time being recognised as serious authors here.
“It means that a lot of writers are being taught not to develop their humorous side. Again and again I meet German authors who are really funny people, but then I look in their books and there’s none of that here, because they’ve been taught to hide it.”
Goethe, Kehlmann’s theory goes, may be one of the culprits, having dismissed humour as nothing more than a technique to disguise bad character. German high culture’s resentment of comedy runs deep. “Our literature was shaped in the parsonage: most of the great German writers of the 19th century were the children of protestant pastors. They produced literature that was mainly about exploring your inner conscience.
“That’s also why the novel was never able to fully flourish in the German language. We could do poetry, because poetry is the individual’s engagement with him or herself and with God. The novel is the exploration of society’s interdependencies. But Germans didn’t know what society was: they only knew villages and parsonages. Austria is different in that respect: it had a courtly society, and in courtly societies indirect speech, irony and humour are very important, you have to be able to entertain people.”
Like its two most obvious influences, Franzen’s The Corrections and Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, F isn’t a comedy in the traditional sense: it jumps between genres, toying with melodrama here, riffing on the gothic horror story there.
The chapter that follows the unravelling of financial adviser Eric’s mind is reminiscent of Franz Kafka or Elias Canetti – both laugh-out-loud funny and so uncomfortable that one occasionally needs to put the book down to get a breather, a kind of comedy of paranoia. Delirious on antidepressants, Eric stumbles around his home only to discover a hidden cellar door, and at the bottom of the stairs, another flight of stairs … A classic Austrian motif, surely, straight out of the imaginations of Freud or Michael Haneke? “Oh, that scene has nothing to do with psychoanalysis. I’m with Nabokov on this: symbols bleach the soul, they numb our capacity to enjoy the fun and enchantment of art. I’m a big fan of classic horror fiction: Algernon Blackwood, MR James, HP Lovecraft. And in Eric’s case, it’s like the old joke: paranoid people can have enemies too.”
Is F, a book about sons and fathers, not a book about his relationship to his own father? “I know books can end up meaning something different from what their authors intended, but I don’t think here that’s the case. Unlike the father in my novel, my father was always very much there for me.” Becoming a father is a more life-changing experience than losing one, Kehlmann believes, whose first child was born in 2009.
His three previous novels were all explorations of the nature of artistic genius, even if the very notion of genius was ridiculed along the way. F, in contrast, is largely about men with limited means: priest Martin used to take part in Rubik’s Cube tournaments, but lost his touch; brother Iwan is a talented artist, but he sells his paintings under someone else’s name; even their father Arthur returns to admit that swapping family life for literary success may not have been worth it.
“The absoluteness of responsibility,” Kehlmann says, “that’s something you only understand when you become a father yourself, and I think that might have worked its way into this book. Believing in your own genius – sometimes that’s just an excuse.”
Kehlmann, Daniel TYLL Pantheon (Adult Fiction) $26.95 2, 11 ISBN: 978-1-5247-4746-6
One of Germany's most celebrated young novelists updates and transforms the 16th-century classic Till Eulenspiegel.
The story is now set during the Thirty Years' War, 300 years after the time of the original story. And the boy protagonist's name is now spelled Tyll Ulenspiegel. After his Lutheran father, Claus, a miller, is hanged by the fanatical Jesuit inquisitor Oswald Tesimond for possessing books on black magic, Tyll escapes his village with his sister, Nele. A precocious kid with an obsession for tightrope walking, he becomes a prankish entertainer and provocateur who can transfix crowds with his act and create chaos. Told through multiple points of view, the novel mixes such historical figures as Elizabeth, exiled Winter Queen of Bohemia, with folkloric characters including a talking donkey named Origenes. Parts of the book could hardly be more relevant to the present, including this circular exchange on torture: "Without torture no one would ever confess anything!" "Whereas under torture everyone confesses." In exploring the borders between history and myth, Kehlmann (You Should Have Left, 2017, etc.) sometimes risks putting off readers with his intellectual gamesmanship. More often, he creates odd, darkly entertaining scenes. The miller is at the center of several of them. He is executed for possessing a book of spells that he can't read because it's in Latin. And no one has ever faced the gallows as sated as Claus, who pushes an all-you-can-eat last-meal policy to the max.
A richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kehlmann, Daniel: TYLL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A605549625/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fa436116. Accessed 6 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A605549625
Daniel Kehlmann, trans, from the German by Ross Benjamin. Pantheon, $26.95 (352p) ISBN 978-1-5247-4746-6
The latest from Kehlmann (Measuring the World) is a rollicking historical picaresque that follows the legendary trickster, acrobat, juggler, and jack-of-all-trades Tyll Ulenspiegel as he and his company make their way through a 17th-century German countryside gutted by the Thirty Years' War. After his father, a miller in a small village, is executed by the Jesuits for heresy (courtesy of an unusually sympathetic hangman), the young Tyll escapes with his adopted sister, Nele, and becomes pupil to the wandering (and treacherous) entertainer Pirmin. Tyll's ensuing adventures unfold over the course of eight distinct episodes resembling folktales, some of which put the canny Tyll in the foreground, while others feature him only as a witness to the main action. In this manner, readers meet the fat count Martin von Wolkenstein en route from the Viennese court in the thick of battle as he encounters a slyly mocking Tyll in the forest; next, Tyll appears in the Hague as the court fool of the so-called "Winter King" Friedrich V and his queen, who are in exile from their kingdom in Bohemia; and two unlikely traveling companions, the great mathematician Adam Olearius and the occultist Dr. Kircher (who is searching the land for dragon's blood in order to cure the plague), find themselves guests of Tyll, Nele, and Origenes, their talking donkey--and these are just a few highlights. Located somewhere between German romanticism and modernism, superstition and science, history and high fantasy, this is a rapturous and adventuresome novel of ideas that, like Tyll's roaming sideshow, must be experienced to be believed. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tyll." Publishers Weekly, 21 Oct. 2019, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A605200710/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0f73bdd7. Accessed 6 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A605200710
Kehlmann, Daniel YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT Pantheon (Adult Fiction) $18.00 6, 13 ISBN: 978-1-101-87192-8
A beautifully crafted exercise in terror from one of Germany's most celebrated contemporary authors.The unnamed narrator of this novella is a screenwriter trying to complete a sequel to his hit, Besties. In order to help him work, he and his wife retreat to a rental house in the mountains, taking their 4-year-old daughter with them. This is, of course, hardly a distraction-free environment. The notebook that is supposed to be devoted to his script is filled with more personal matter--good-natured grumbling about raising a small child, descriptions of the tensions within his marriage, and complaints about the difficulties he's having figuring out what happens next for his characters. The parenting vignettes are funny: "Meanwhile Esther was telling us about a friend from preschool who is named either Lisi or Ilse or Else and either took a toy away from her or gave her one...; little kids are not good storytellers." The conflicts between the narrator and his wife, Susanna, are less innocent, and they threaten to darken what should be an innocuous chick flick. Then the bad dreams begin, and it's not long before the line between these night terrors and everyday reality begins to blur. This novel is, in many ways, a classic haunted-house tale. There are warnings about the house from the people in the village below. There's a creeping sense of horror. There are frightening phenomena that the narrator cannot explain. And there are specters. Kehlmann (F, 2014, etc.) uses all these familiar tropes beautifully. But he also creates a sense of existential dread that transcends the typical ghost story. The relationship between the narrator and his daughter adds a level of anxiety; he has to protect her not just from the house, but also from knowledge of what's happening. And Kehlmann deserves special notice for recognizing just how uncanny a baby monitor can be. A book to keep you up at night.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kehlmann, Daniel: YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A491002897/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=63bd4177. Accessed 6 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002897
You Should Have Left
Daniel Kehlmann, trans, from the German by Ross Benjamin. Pantheon, $18 (128p) ISBN 978-1-101-87192-8
A family vacation in the mountains goes terrifyingly off-script in Kehlmann's brief and chilling novel. The narrator, a screenwriter working on a sequel to his last successful film, begins a notebook to record the highlights of the trip. At first, this record shows the conventional frustrations of marriage: the screenwriter feels distant from his wife, an actress named Susanna, and is bored by caring for their four-year-old daughter, Esther. As the rift between spouses widens, however, he begins to notice and describe inexplicable and increasingly frightening phenomena. His reflection goes missing from the windows of the rented house; photographs appear and disappear from the walls; disturbing dreams of "an empty room, a naked light bulb on the ceiling," and a woman with "awful eyes" haunts his sleep. Then a stranger encountered in the nearest village advises him to "quickly get away," and the same message also begins to appear in the notebook, in his own handwriting--but it may already be too late to escape the house's influence. Kehlmann (Measuring the World) makes deft use of horror staples and offers commentary on the distinction between art and life: "in a movie it's funny when a life falls apart, because the people say clever things while it's happening, but in reality it's only dismal and repugnant." But the plot of this spare and occasionally thrilling novel is ultimately indistinguishable from a by-the-numbers horror flick. (June)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"You Should Have Left." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A490820755/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c712488e. Accessed 6 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820755
Daniel Kehlmann
You Should Have Left
Trans. Ross Benjamin. New York. Vintage. 2018. 132 pages.
It is early December and our narrator is under pressure to complete a screenplay for a sequel to his highly popular previous comedy He and his wife and daughter have rented a remote chalet in the Alps. Now that the daughter is four, there's less need to argue who takes care of what with her. But this only means the parents natter at each other about everything else. She: It's just a screenplay, it's not art! He: It pays for the house with the yard the kid never uses! He's suffering from writer's block; she's no longer getting ingenue roles. Their arguments echo in the script the narrator is sketching--and in everything else. Nothing is as it should be. The house seems to have extra rooms. Pictures appear where none had been before. And the words "Get away" appear mysteriously in his notebook, even within the script.
Low on provisions after a few days, he descends the treacherously serpentine road to the tiny village below and its one general store. As he gathers his items, the surly shopkeeper cryptically asks, "Anything happen yet?" People have been known to mysteriously disappear-lots of dangerous crevasses, and the rescue-service chief is mostly drunk. A woman who overhears this waits by his car and tells him, "Get away quickly."
It's certainly a narrative tour de force: as Kehlmann deftly demonstrates, a good writer can get his readers to believe pretty much anything. We are obviously to be reminded of Steven King's The Shining, but the way Kehlmann depicts that lonely road up to the chalet may make us think, too, of the door that Kafka's doorkeeper shuts. This is the door "before the law" that had been reserved solely for the supplicant; just as the solitary road leads only to that chalet, a chalet had just been newly built, as if expressly for him.
We are thus kept in thrall not by some lurking horror but by the skewed qualities of the narrative. We get an inkling of how off-kilter everything is getting when the narrator cannot remember the little white lie he told his daughter the first time she asks where mommy is. As Ross Benjamin conveys it in elegantly straightforward English, this is a writer who has truly gone over the edge.
Ulf Zimmermann
Kennesaw State University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Zimmermann, Ulf. "Daniel Kehlmann: You Should Have Left." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 5, 2018, p. 76+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A553279914/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=77791e33. Accessed 6 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A553279914
You Should Have Left review: welcome to a hall of mirrors
Daniel Kehlmann is a formidable observer with a flair for articulating dysfunctional behaviour
Author Daniel Kehlmann. He exploded on the literary scene with his fifth novel, Measuring the World. Photograph: Sven Paustian
Eileen Battersby
Sat, Jun 10, 2017, 06:30
First published:
Sat, Jun 10, 2017, 06:30
Buy Now
Book Title:
You Should Have Left
ISBN-13:
978-1786484048
Author:
Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin
Publisher:
Riverrun
Guideline Price:
£10.00
It seems too good to be true; the perfect holiday home complete with a brand new teddy. Everything works; the mountain views are spectacular. For an all-too-human scriptwriter, with an edgy actor wife and a toddler in tow, never mind the pressure of a late deadline, it could be the idyll in which to write the elusive sequel to his commercially successful movie Besties, the story apparently of a friendship-turned-rivalry between two young women.
“It’s fitting that I’m beginning a new notebook up here. New surroundings, new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air,” records the harassed unnamed narrator of You Should Have Left; a hint of despairing hope already audible in his voice as he agonises over the words he has chosen to describe his personal sensations to himself.
Added to that, he is a natural worrier. Within sentences of revealing that his daughter “turned four” the previous week, he is commenting on the dangerous road leading to the house. That and the fact his wife is a “horrendous” driver ignites yet another argument.
Munich-born, internationally-based Daniel Kehlmann exploded on the literary scene with his fifth novel, Measuring the World, a stylish Enlightenment romp featuring the explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt juxtaposed with mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, which was published in Germany in 2005. It quickly took Europe by storm, while the English translation by Carol Brown Janeway, which was published two years later, made him famous at 32.
It was followed by Fame in 2010, only a year after its German publication. It is an episodic narrative centring on mankind’s latest tyrannical master – the mobile phone. In Janeway, Kehlmann had found a close friend and the perfect collaborator capable of conveying his humour, linguistic panache and subtle levels of emotional intelligence.
The partnership was brilliantly consolidated with F, a poignant family tragicomedy about three brothers and their self-obsessed estranged father. The German edition was published in 2013, and followed within a year by Janeway’s intuitive translation, which was widely acclaimed as a Book of the Year. It was to be her final project with Kehlmann.
You Should Have Left, his first book since her death in 2015, is wry, eerie and increasingly terrifying. Ross Benjamin effectively conveys the cryptic quality of the conversational narrative being uttered by a man who may be actually losing his mind, or, then again, merely in the throes of a great idea.
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Scoring points
The couple bicker away with Susanna, the wife, exploiting her actor’s voice in scoring points. Her career may be in decline but she gleefully ridicules his work and, as he records in his notebook: “ . . . always has to bring up classics to remind me that she had a degree in comp lit and classical studies, whereas I’ve never attended a university”.
He notices everything; possibly because he is in a heightened state, looking for anything that will trigger a story. Honest enough to admit regretting that he can’t identify birds by name; he says he knows nothing about the respective childhoods of the characters he invented in his previous screenplay. “I told the students at the film academy last year that you should know everything about your characters, especially where and how they grew up,” he confides to his notebook, “but I only said it because it’s in the textbooks.”
Kehlmann is a formidable observer with a flair for articulating dysfunctional behaviour. Benjamin’s fluid, savvy translation is alert to the fact that every word has relevance, each hesitation and minor pause adds to the building tension.
While the adults snarl at each other, little Esther chatters merrily: “ . . . telling us about a friend from preschool who is named either Lisi or Ilse or Else and either took a toy away from her or gave her one, at which point the teachers did either nothing at all or just the right thing, or something wrong; little kids are not good storytellers.” Not like Kehlmann.
The house may not have secrets but the place does. When the narrator braves the dangerous road to collect supplies from the only shop in the village, he is warned by the grumpy shopkeeper and then fears what else is being said when another villager arrives and further exchanges are made in an incomprehensible dialect.
Stephen King’s classic The Shining will come to mind, as may a more recent study in menacing experiences at vacation time – Samanta Schweblin’s Man Booker International contender Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell. Kehlmann really succeeds in keeping everyone guessing.
Sinister forces
Long before the narrator opens one door to flee a room only to discover that another door leads him back, it is clear sinister forces may be at work. All the while the toddler keeps her head as she has no difficulty in balancing fantasy with reality.
Anyone who has ever been transfixed by the creepiness of baby monitors will shudder at reliving the experience. Figures appear at windows and the empty space of a deserted mountainside suddenly acquires an intense claustrophobia.
Set over five days, the novel is an excursion into one man’s thoughts; his imagination is at war with his responsibility and the terror is real. So is the humour: as the narrator prepares to lie to his producer about the progress he has made on the script, the little girl begins to wail. “Just a minute, Daddy has to talk on the phone, stop crying!” The producer, still on the line, waits for the nonexistent plot outline. The narrator senses a lack of trust.
Having walked around in circles in the dark, father and child are back in the house which refuses to release them. The narrator is aware of a man having been in the room with them: “ . . . he wasn’t standing on the floor but on the ceiling, and he was looking down at me as if he wanted to ask for help. But he was only here briefly, and I’m so exhausted that I might also have imagined him.”
Welcome to a hall of mirrors; the narrator could be entering a hell all of his own making. Or then again, perhaps he is in control? Daniel Kehlmann certainly is in complete mastery of an entertaining Everyman’s postmodernist Gothic guaranteed to unsettle.
Eileen Battersby is literary correspondent. She will be interviewing Edmund White and John Boyne, and also reading from her novel Teethmarks on My Tongue, at Festival of Writing & Ideas, Borris House, on Sunday, June 11th
Sat, Jun 10, 2017, 06:30
First published:
Sat, Jun 10, 2017, 06:30
Read More
29 December 2017 by tmn
Daniel Kehlmann: Tyll [Till]
The latest addition to my website is Daniel Kehlmann‘s Tyll [Till]. It is based on the legend of the trickster Till Eulenspiegel though Kehlmann has moved him from his traditional 14th century date to the Thirty Years’ War. We follow Till’s childhood – his father is executed by the Jesuits for witchcraft – and his escape from his village with Nele, his girlfriend who is not his girlfriend. They become travelling players and their reputation spreads far and wide, so much so that Till becomes the official fool of Frederick V of the Palatinate. We follow political events through the eyes of Frederick’s wife, the Scottish Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, known to history as the Winter Queen. Frederick dies of an infection while seeking help in his war from Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Kehlmann is eager to point out the horrors of war, and this war is bloody, messy and very badly organised. It is not Kehlmann’s best – jumping from Till and his adventures to Elizabeth Stuart and her problems and the problems of her husband, but is still worth reading.