The figure at the center dominates mainly through his absence. In fact, this shortish novel is a page-turner, spiked with funny, deadpan observations of our disjunctive, modern, so-called life.
Which is not to say that F lacks a unifying narrative. It’s a 256 page cornucopia, pouring out what-ifs and alternative perspectives on the human condition as if its author could hardly stop the flow even if he wanted to. Who wants to have to read Sartre again?į is a novel of ideas of a different kind. The driving abstract concept has a tendency to become the protagonist, draining life from its marionette-like supporting characters. It is not a category of fiction readers especially seek out. When people talk about the “novel of ideas,” they generally mean a narrative built around a single idea, or maybe two or three at most. This debut novel, which foreshadows certain tropes – if not obsessions – of F, was greeted by critics cautiously, as typified by the caveat from one reviewer that it was “too self-conscious…although the author may be on the right path.” Kehlmann responded with five books in seven years, including the multiple prize-winning 2006 novel Measuring the World, a strangely moving chronicle of the intertwined lives of Carl Gauss, mathematician, and Alexander von Humboldt, world explorer. Vorstellung (the word can mean both ‘show’ and ‘idea’) tells the story of a magician whose mastery of craft opens a personal trap-door of endless illusion. His soaring, daring new novel, F, delivers the proof.īorn in Munich in 1975 to an actor mother and theater-director father, Kehlmann grew up in Vienna, studied philosophy and literature, and published his first novel, Beerholm’s Vorstellung, at age 22. Doctorow, July 4, 2011.ĭaniel Kehlmann, one of the most brilliant writers working today in any language, has not been thrown off course by early success. It gives one the impression that everything is easy and that imagination knows no limits.” “Good literature comes from an economy of means, great literature from extravagant squandering. “The terrifying beauty of things” does, too.į: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann.
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