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Summary
Summary
F is for family. F is for fortune. F is for fraud. F is for fate.
From the internationally acclaimed author of Measuring the World, here is a dazzling tragicomedy about three brothers whose father takes on the occult and both wins and loses.
Arthur is a dilettante, a wannabe writer who decides to fill an afternoon by taking his three young sons to a performance by the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. While allowing one of them to be called onto the stage and made a spectacle of, Arthur declares himself to be immune to hypnosis and a disbeliever in all magic. But the Great Lindemann knows better. He gets Arthur to tell him his deepest secrets and then tells him to make them real. That night, Arthur empties the family bank account, takes his passport, and vanishes. He's going to become a world-famous author, a master of the mystical. (F is for fake.)
But what of the boys? Martin, painfully shy, grows up to be a Catholic priest without a vocation. (F is for faith, and lack of it.) Eric becomes a financier (F is for fraud), losing touch with reality as he faces ruin, while Ivan, destined for glory as a painter, instead becomes a forger. (F is for forgery, too.) They've settled into their life choices, but when the summer of the global financial crisis dawns they're thrown together again with cataclysmic results.
Wildly funny, heartbreaking, tragic, Daniel Kehlmann's novel about truth, family, and the terrible power of fortune is a fictional triumph.
Author Notes
Daniel Kehlmann was born on January 13, 1975 in Munich. He is a German language author. His work Die Vermessung der Welt (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway as Measuring the World, 2006) is the best selling novel in the German language since Patrick Süskind's Perfume was released in 1985.
In 1997 Kehlmann completed his first novel, Beerholms Vorstellung, while still a student. He also wrote numerous reviews and essays while at university. In 2001, Kehlmann held the guest lectureship of poetics at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. In the winter term of 2005/6 Kehlmann held the lectureship of poetics at the FH Wiesbaden, and in 2006/7 he held the lectureship for poetics at the university of Göttingen. Daniel Kehlmann is a member of the Mainzer Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur. In 2015 he made the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist with his title, F.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Three brothers struggle to find their place in the world in this novel from German author Kehlmann (Fame). Middling writer Arthur Friedland spends his days penning novels no publisher would print and his off-hours devising ways to entertain his three sons: identical twins Ivan and Eric, and an older son, Martin, from a previous marriage. One afternoon, the foursome go to see "The Great Lindemann," a hypnotist whose words of advice prompt Arthur to go home, empty his bank account, and vanish, emerging years later as a successful, if eccentric, author. Meanwhile, Martin, Ivan, and Eric spend the next few decades dealing with their feelings of abandonment. Martin has become a shiftless priest who doesn't believe in God; painter Ivan feels disillusioned with the very concept of art; and money manager Eric is losing both his mind and his Ponzi scheme of a business. Together, the hapless trio face their existential crises. Kehlmann sometimes presents the same scene from different brothers' perspectives, thereby illuminating their skewed experiences of the world. The novel that emerges is both bizarre and bleakly humorous, a slim manifesto on the divide between people's dreams and their destinies. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Kehlmann, best known for Measuring the World (2008) and Fame (2010), here delivers a confounding novel on the nature of fate and the difficulty of finding meaning in the world. Crotchety Arthur Friedland takes his three young sons to see the Great Lindemann, a famous hypnotist, and, after undergoing a transformative experience while on stage with the wizened maestro, promptly leaves his family, retreating from the world to write books. His three sons never fully recover from the abandonment: Martin becomes a priest, although he has no faith; Eric is a devious, deeply neurotic businessman; and Ivan, a painter, recognizes that he will never be a great artist and becomes a great forger instead. Shifting the perspective among the three miserable sons, Kehlmann emphasizes the discomfort of people never fully at home in the world, always striving to cover up the deep emptiness of a life lived wholly on the surface. He does, however, end on a note of optimism, as Arthur's granddaughter, at the tender age of 16, is already excitedly formulating a life built around art, medicine, and travel.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ONE THING NEARLY certain about a novel whose title is merely a letter of the alphabet is that any review will probably contain what grammarians call "modals," words that imply possibility: "This enigmatic title may refer to ..." or "Given the author's many winks at the reader, such a title might...." As with Thomas Pynchon's "V." or Tom McCarthy's "C," in Daniel Kehlmann's subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel, readers and characters alike exist for a time in that hazy, uncertain land, where there is not only the desire but the need to solve for x - or, in Kehlmann's case, "F" - a need to assign value, to accord meaning, to map connections, to know the mind of the creator. Not such an easy task, either in fiction or in life, as the three Friedland brothers - Ivan, Eric and Martin - and their father, Arthur, discover in Kehlmann's novel, translated deftly from the German by Carol Brown Janeway. As 13-year-old Ivan, an aspiring artist, notes while brooding on the mystery of art: "There was nothing about it in any book. No one to help you. No book, no teacher. You had to figure out everything important for yourself, and if you didn't, you had failed your life's purpose." Eventually, after years of practice, Ivan confronts this failure head-on: "I was never going to rank as a painter. This much I now knew. I worked the same way I had before, but there was no longer any point.... What does it mean to be average - suddenly the question became a constant one. How do you live with that, why do you keep on going?" Again, a philosophical query that's not so easy to answer, either for Ivan the would-be painter or for his feckless father, Arthur the would-be writer, unemployed, unambitious and unpublished outside of a few literary journals he doesn't count, whose wife, a wealthy eye doctor, supports him and the family financially. When the novel opens in 1984, Arthur is taking his three teenage sons to see a sideshow hypnotist who, despite Arthur's skepticism, coaxes him into making an effort to rise above his own mediocrity: "No matter what it costs." That night, Arthur takes "his passport and all the money in their joint account" and sends his wife a telegram saying "they shouldn't wait for him, he wouldn't be coming back for a long time." His sons will not see him again until they are adults, by which time Arthur will have become a wildly successful albeit reclusive writer. His novel "My Name Is No One," featuring a hero called "F," is so popular that its hopeless message - human consciousness is meaningless and none of us actually exist - inspires a spate of suicides. Here's Martin ruminating on his father's indolence: "Could it be that Arthur's answer to the question of why he had walked out on him and his mother, was that anyone who gave himself over to captivity and the restricted life, to mediocrity and despair, would be incapable of helping any other human being because he would be beyond help himself, succumbing to cancer, heart disease, his life cut short, rot invading his still-breathing body?" The novel then jumps ahead 24 years, unspooling three elegantly intertwined chapters that make up the bulk of the book, intersecting at crucial moments, each narrated by a brother. Martin is now an obese and faithless priest, more obsessed with solving the Rubik's cube (he's ranked No. 22 nationally) and eating candy bars in the confessional than with confronting the mysteries of his lost faith. Ivan, having accepted his lack of original talent, is now a skilled and wealthy international art forger who rationalizes his deception by saying that "all museums are full of fakes. So what?" Finally, there is the depressed, anxious and heavily medicated Eric, Ivan's uncannily identical twin, who is a financial fraud, bilking his clients out of millions and cheating on his wife with everyone from his secretaries to his therapist to his maid, "not in the kitchen or on my desk," he admits, "but in the master bedroom in our marriage bed." Each brother's story offers a variation on Ivan's question - how do you live with mediocrity, why do you keep on going? - conveying the implicit message that Fate with a capital F has already decided the answer for us, the possibility for transcendence so remote as to be almost nonexistent. Yet Kehlmann's ambitious narrative structure - the novel itself - provides the strongest rebuke of that deterministic claim. For the novel, with its sly Möbius-strip-like connectedness, doesn't just hint at the possibility of a plan behind the scenes; it enacts that plan in the very telling, its elegant, unfolding construction revealing the author's intended pattern by book's end; a sign of hope, perhaps, or even faith, if one chooses to interpret it that way. The alert reader may note that each brother's adult struggle begins with the letter F - faith, forgery, fraud - as does the name of Arthur's protagonist. Toward the end of "F," Arthur even reveals what the letter stands for. But by that point, given the author's many winks at the reader, such information might be little more than a feint. JOSEPH SALVATORE, the author of the story collection "To Assume a Pleasing Shape," is the book review editor for fiction and poetry at The Brooklyn Rail. He teaches writing and literature at the New School.
Guardian Review
It cannot be an easy thing to write a comic novel about the death of God. Still, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann may just have pulled it off. "F" is the protagonist of a book within a book, the debut novel of Arthur Friedland, a rather disorganised buffoon who never had any success as a writer until an encounter with a hypnotist gave his life its chilly purpose: "This is an order, and you're going to follow it because you want to follow it, and you want to because I'm ordering you, and I'm ordering you because you want me to give the order. Starting today, you're going to make an effort. No matter what it costs. Repeat!" My Name Is No One is so exuberantly nihilistic, its readers are throwing themselves off TV transmission towers. As Kehlmann says: "The sentences are well constructed, the narrative has a powerful flow, the reader would be enjoying the text were it not for a persistent feeling of somehow being mocked." If Kehlmann played this intertextual game to the hilt - if F itself were as unforgiving as Arthur's novel - then we would be looking at a less important book, as well as a less enjoyable one: some Johnny-come-lately contribution to the French nouvelle vague. The spirit of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movement's greatest exponent, illuminates the scene in which Arthur takes his granddaughter to an art museum to study a picture by her missing uncle: "She stepped even closer, and immediately everything dissolved. There were no more people any more, no more little flags, no anchor, no bent watch. There were just some tiny bright patches of colour above the main deck. The white of the naked canvas shone through in several places, and even the ship was a mere assemblage of lines and dots. Where had it all gone?" There are many such moments, they are all as beautifully judged as this one, and they are not the point. The point of F is not its humour (though Kehlmann, like Robbe-Grillet, can be very funny indeed), but its generosity. Arthur's three sons, in their turn, make superhuman efforts to give their lives significance, and these efforts tangle and trip over each other to generate the comic business of the book. The eldest, Martin, a Rubik's Cube expert, embraces the priesthood despite his lack of faith. Of Arthur's two sons by his second marriage, Eric enters the glass-and-steel world of high finance to help control his fear of cramped spaces. His twin brother, Ivan, is a would-be painter turned art dealer, and author of Mediocrity As an Aesthetic Phenomenon "When I was young, vain, and lacking all experience," he recalls, "I thought the art world was corrupt. Today I know that's not true. The art world is full of lovable people, full of enthusiasts, full of longing and truth. It is art itself as a sacred principle that unfortunately doesn't exist." Ivan, like all the others, lives in a nihilistic universe, but he is not himself nihilistic. It worries him that the world cannot live up to his expectations and those of the people he admires. These people include his lover Heinrich Eulenboeck, an artist with a true calling but only mediocre ability. What kind of world is it that plays such a trick on a person? "How do you live with that, why do you keep on going?" The answer seems to be love. In a godless world, love counts for a great deal. And failing love, human decency goes a long way. Since Kurt Vonnegut died, there has really been no one to tell us this; the reminder is welcome. F is a better book than Kehlmann's last, Fame, whose narrative gymnastics caused characters to lose or swap their identities, and even to topple into their own or other people's fictions. Fame was knowing, driven by its own absurdity. F is about the world's absurdity, and this makes a huge difference morally. The world is big, and ultimately unknowable, and life is short and memory pitifully limited. In the absence of God, Kehlmann's protagonists hold themselves to account, and they give themselves hell. Sometimes, they give each other hell. "Something terrible has happened and the people seem to be wanting to cover it up. If you were to look a little longer, hunt a little better for clues, you'd be able to figure it out, or at least you think so. But if you step back, the details disappear and all that remains is a colourful street scene: bright, cheerful, full of life." It is very hard to express how funny this all is. But laughter matters most in the dark. Simon Ings's latest novel is Wolves (Gollancz). - Simon Ings Caption: Captions: Laughter in the dark . . . Kehlmann It cannot be an easy thing to write a comic novel about the death of God. Still, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann may just have pulled it off. "F" is the protagonist of a book within a book, the debut novel of Arthur Friedland, a rather disorganised buffoon who never had any success as a writer until an encounter with a hypnotist gave his life its chilly purpose: "This is an order, and you're going to follow it because you want to follow it, and you want to because I'm ordering you, and I'm ordering you because you want me to give the order. Starting today, you're going to make an effort. No matter what it costs. Repeat!" If Kehlmann played this intertextual game to the hilt - if F itself were as unforgiving as Arthur's novel - then we would be looking at a less important book, as well as a less enjoyable one: some Johnny-come-lately contribution to the French nouvelle vague. The spirit of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movement's greatest exponent, illuminates the scene in which Arthur takes his granddaughter to an art museum to study a picture by her missing uncle: "She stepped even closer, and immediately everything dissolved. There were no more people any more, no more little flags, no anchor, no bent watch. There were just some tiny bright patches of colour above the main deck. The white of the naked canvas shone through in several places, and even the ship was a mere assemblage of lines and dots. Where had it all gone?" - Simon Ings.
Kirkus Review
An elusive novel whose events remain cryptic and largely unexplained.The central event of the novel occurs in 1984, when Arthur Friedland takes his three sons to see the Great Lindemann, a hypnotist, in a public performance. The oldest son is Martin, and the other two (by a different mother) are twins Ivan and Eric. They have not been closein fact, they scarcely know each other at allbut their appearance with their father that afternoon in some ways informs the rest of their lives. The unemployed Arthur boasts to Lindemann: "You cant hypnotize me.I know how [hypnotism] works" and suggests that the hypnotist find a more pliant subject. Lindemann does, however, succeed in hypnotizing Arthur, and during hypnosis, Arthur reveals that he wants to get away from his current life. The next day, Arthur takes his passport, cleans out his bank account and sends a telegram to his wife, informing her that hell be away a long time. The narrative then shifts to Arthurs sons, now grown men. Martin has converted to Roman Catholicism and become a priest. (He's also an expert solver of the Rubiks Cube puzzle and participates in national contests.) Eric becomes a fraudulent investor who cant get through a day without doses of anti-anxiety and antidepressant medicines, and Ivan becomes an art forger in league with the mediocre, yet in-demand, artist whose work he fakes. Meanwhile, the reclusive Arthur has become a best-selling author whose cynical semiautobiographical book, My Name Is No One, featuring a main character named F, has led to a rash of suicides by readers who take its message of hopelessness to heart.German writer Kehlmann (Fame, 2010, etc.) takes us on a strange and enigmatic journey here. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This offbeat and entertaining novel centers on a family in Germany. Arthur, seemingly an eccentric deadbeat, is father to three sons: Martin by one woman; twins Ivan and Eric by another. Arthur takes the boys to see a performing hypnotist, and even though he is totally skeptical, Arthur ends up under-going hypnosis on stage. After bringing the boys home, he abruptly vanishes from their lives. After his disappearance Arthur resurfaces as a successful and famous author. The novel then devotes long sections to each boy's later lives. Martin has become a priest who does not believe in God. Eric is a formerly successful financial manager who has now become a Bernie Madoff-type schemer, avoiding disgrace and bankruptcy on an hourly basis. Ivan is a talented painter who devotes himself to producing works using a deceased artist's name, and is enjoying great success with this fraud. Woven into these stories are events and conversations seen from multiple viewpoints, leading to a tragedy for one of the brothers and a surprising resurrection for another. Traces of mythology and magic occasionally surface as the sons blunder through their lives under the spell of their vanished father. Verdict This appealing, well-written novel by Kehlmann (Measuring the World) realistically portrays the brothers' everyday lives as they occasionally stumble into shadowy and mysterious areas.-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I've already been hearing the sobbing for some time. At first it was a sound in my dream, but now the dream is over and the sobbing is coming from the woman next to me. Eyes closed, I know that the voice is Laura's, or, rather, that suddenly it's been hers all along. She's crying so hard that the mattress is shaking. I lie there motionless. How long can I pretend I'm asleep? I would love to give up and sink back into unconsciousness, but I can't. The day has begun. I open my eyes. The morning sun pushes through the slats of the blind and draws fine lines in both carpet and wall. The pattern on the carpet is symmetrical, but if you look at it for a long time, it captures your attention, gripping it until you can't shake free. Laura is lying next to me in perfect peace, breathing silently, sound asleep. I push back the blanket and get up. As I'm groping my way down the hall, the memory of the dream returns. No doubt about it, it was my grandmother. She looked tired, worn out, and somehow not complete, as if only a portion of her soul had managed to force its way through to me. She stood in front of me, bent over, leaning on a walking stick, with two ballpoint pens sticking out of her bun. She opened and closed her mouth and made signs with her hands; she was determined to tell me something. She looked unutterably weary, lips pursed, eyes pleading, until in the next moment some change in the dream washed her away and I was somewhere else, surrounded by other things. I will never know what she wanted to tell me. I shave, get into the shower, and turn on the hot tap. The water is warm, then hot, then very hot, which is how I like it. I tip my head back and let the water beat down on me, listen to the noise, feel the pain, and forget absolutely everything for a moment. It doesn't last long. Already the memory comes crashing back like a wave. Perhaps I can hold out for another couple of months, maybe even three, but not longer. I turn off the water, get out of the shower, and push my face into the terrycloth of the bath towel. As always, my memory reacts to the smell, calling up images: Mama taking me to bed wrapped in a towel, Papa's tall figure outlined by the ceiling light, his tousled hair in silhouette, Ivan already asleep in the other bed, our sandbox where I always knocked over the towers he built, a meadow, a worm he found that I split in half, and he cried and cried. Or was it the other way around? I put on my bathrobe. Now I need my medication. In my study everything is normal. This calms me. The desk with its big screen, the Paul Klee on one wall and the Eulenboeck on the other, the empty files. I have never worked here. Even the drawers are empty and not one of the reference books has ever been opened. But when I sit here and pretend to be lost in thought, no one comes in, and that counts for something in and of itself. Two Thropren, a Torbit, a Prevoxal, and a Valium--I can't begin the day with too much, because I have to be able to up the dose if something unforeseen occurs. I swallow them all in one gulp; it's unpleasant and I have to use all my willpower to conquer the gag reflex. Why I always take them without water, I have no idea. Already I can feel them working. It's probably my imagination, nothing could work that fast, but is that important? Indifference settles over me like cotton wool. Life goes on. One day you'll lose it all, the name Eric Friedland will be abhorred, those who still trust you will curse you, your family will fall apart, and they'll lock you up. But not today. I'll never be able to tell anyone how much I hate this Paul Klee. Lopsided diamonds, red on a black background, and next to them a windblown, truly pitiful little matchstick man. Even I could have painted it. I know I'm not supposed to even think such a sentence, it is utterly forbidden, but I can't help it, even I could have painted it, it would have taken me less than five minutes! Instead of which I paid seven hundred and fifty thousand euros for it, but a man in my position must possess a very expensive painting: Janke has a Kandinsky, Nettleback of BMW has a Monet--maybe it's a Manet, what do I know?--and old Rebke, my golf partner, has a Richard Serra on the lawn, huge, rusty, and always in the way at garden parties. So I asked Ivan two years ago to get me a picture too, it just had to be something that was a sure thing. He immediately pretended he didn't understand me. He likes doing that--it amuses him. What did I mean, "sure thing"? "Sure thing," I said, "means that it impresses everyone. That no expert has something against the artist. Like with Picasso. Or Leonardo. One of those guys." He laughed at me. He likes doing that too. Picasso? There were hundreds of experts who didn't take Picasso seriously, and if you chose one of his wrong periods, you'd be criticized willy-nilly. Almost no one had a good word to say about his late work, for example! But Paul Klee, you could get one of his, no one had anything against Paul Klee. "And Leonardo?" "No Leonardos on the market. Take Klee." Then he attended the auction for me. At half a million he called me to ask if he should keep bidding. I would like to have yelled at him. But what if he thought I couldn't even afford a matchstick man? For a while it hung in the salon, then Laura suddenly didn't like it anymore. So since then it's been hanging over my desk, staring at me in a pushy way and doing damage in my dreams. I can't sell it, too many people have seen it in the salon where I have of course pointed it out to them, look at my Klee, what do you think of my Klee, yes of course it's genuine! As soon as the investigators start work, one of their first questions will be where the Klee is. Art is a trap, nothing more, cleverly dreamed up by people like my brother! Still in my bathrobe I go along the hall and down the stairs to the media room. There's a screen and a video beamer. The black cubes of the speakers are powerful enough to service a football stadium. A soft leather couch sits in front of it. The remote is lying on the table. Without thinking about it I sit down, reach for it, and press a couple of buttons. The screen hums into life: the early-morning TV programming--a nature film. A dragonfly lands on a stalk. Its legs are no bigger than a hair, its wings tremble, and its antennae touch the rough green. Interesting, but it reminds me about the camera. There's one hidden in one of the appliances. It would be strange if there weren't one, because they're so easy to conceal, I would never find it among all the lenses. I push another button, the meadow disappears, to be replaced by some undersecretary standing behind a lectern and talking so fast that you'd think everything must hang on his finishing as fast as possible. "No," I say. "No, no, no, no. No!" Luckily that helps. He slows down. But unfortunately he's noticed me. Without stopping talking, he casts a swift glance in my direction. He did it very unobtrusively, but it didn't escape me. I hold my breath. I must not make a wrong move now. Without question it's crazy, I know it, the broadcast with the undersecretary is a recording, nobody gives press conferences this early in the morning. But I also know that he looked at me. "Totally calm. Always keep calm." With cold terror I realize that I said it out loud. I can't make this kind of mistake. And the undersecretary, whose name I suddenly recall--he's called Obermann, Bernd Richard Obermann, and he's responsible for power or education or something--heard it, for a mocking smile appears for a moment on his face. I don't let anything show; I don't lose my cool so easily. Keep calm, I say to myself again, but this time silently and without moving my lips, behave as if everything's fine! Somehow I have to manage to look away from the screen. I concentrate on the edge of my field of vision, and then somewhat blurrily I see something on the carpet, a disturbance in the symmetry: a red wine stain. Damn it, this carpet cost thirty-five thousand euros! My fury helps me to look away from the screen. Out of the corner of my eye I register that Undersecretary Obermann has disappeared. Some harmless man is now talking into the microphone and has no interest in me. Quickly I lift the remote, the picture flames up for a moment and is gone. Excerpted from F: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
