F: A Novel

by Daniel Kehlmann Narrated by Robert Fass, Jim Meskimen, Bronson Pinchot

Overview

From the young, internationally acclaimed author of Measuring the World comes a stunning tragicomic novel about three brothers, their relationship to their distant father, and their individual fates and struggles in the modern world

One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something. Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes. In time, still absent from his family, he begins to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author. His sons grow into men who manifest their inexplicable loss-Martin becomes a priest who does not believe in God; Ivan, a painter in constant artistic crisis; Eric, a businessman given to hallucinations and a fear of ghosts-even as they struggle to understand their father's disappearance and make their own places in the world.

Editorial Reviews

Arthur Friedland, the novelist inside Daniel Kehlmann's F, wants to "write a book that would be a message to a single human being . . . so that nobody aside from this one person could decode it, and this very fact paradoxically would make the book a high literary achievement." A game for a single reader! Even game master Nabokov wrote for two, his wife and son. F is a fictional game from its multi-meaning title to its competition among three first-person narrators to its enigmatic final word, but the game can be played by just about anyone — and it's a game that critiques the ugly penetration of game playing into areas of contemporary life that should be sacrosanct. One of Friedland's three sons, who are the novel's main characters, is a Catholic priest who competes in tournaments timing contestants' solutions of the Cube. But it is not the kind of game Kehlmann has in mind, because working the Cube is purely functional. The permutations of the Cube do not elicit belief, which is a central theme of F, whose title may stand for "faith" among other words that begin with f. And a Rubik's Cube can be solved, its chaos of colors reduced to a simple order. Kehlmann's novel can't be solved, though you can apprehend the moves in his game and mull the questions it poses.

Martin Friedland becomes a priest and dispenses sacraments to the faithful but only pretends to believe in God. One of his twin brothers, Ivan, wants to be an original painter but becomes an art forger, passing off his work as that of an older painter. The other twin, Eric, is a money manager who plunders and then fakes his clients' accounts. All are self- conscious game players, soliciting belief from others in what the brothers suspect or know is fraudulent — another f-word.

When the boys were adolescents, their father took them to a performance by "The Great Lindemann," a hypnotist who assures Arthur "It's all a game" but gets Arthur to believe he wants to leave his family. That night he does, and the sons don't see him for many years. But they all discuss his first novel, My Name Is No One, either a "merry experiment and thus the pure product of a playful spirit or . . . a malevolent attack on the soul of every person who reads it," which could also be extreme descriptions of F. My Name Is No One, the title of which recalls Odysseus' punning game with the Cyclops, has three parts: a conventional but discrepancy-riddled bildungsroman about "F"; a physics- and neurology-based argument against the notion of stable selfhood; and the return of "F" as a man "good for nothing except empty mind games." Under the novel's influence, four readers commit suicide, and Friedland becomes famous.

Two questions recur as Arthur's sons reach their late thirties in a country that's not identified but has a lot of citizens with Germanic names. Did Arthur's abandonment cause his sons' attraction to and repulsion from authority? Did his writings strip them of belief in morality? In the first- person narrations of each son, Kehlmann provides personal details that can be read psychologically and philosophical arguments that can be mused upon abstractly. Martin is physically unattractive and sexually awkward, spends a lot of time with his mother, and finds social refuge in the priesthood. Ivan is gay and worries about the effect of his orientation on his twin. Eric spent some time as a youth in a sanitarium and appears to be bipolar and manic in the present of the novel, which is 2008. Kehlmann supplies enough specifics to create a modicum of belief in these characters as people. At the same time, he presents his characters as figures in an allegory of nihilistic Civilization — the Nietzsche- influenced Arthur Friedland — and its Discontents, the sons who would like to displace or replace him but cannot. The characters think about trompe l'oeil paintings that look different according to the viewer's perspective. In the game of F, now you see the Friedlands, now you don't.

Kehlmann adds a historical dimension to his psychological and philosophical ambiguities with an Arthur Friedland short story, entitled "Family," that is included in the novel. The story traces back in half- page vignettes the lives of a family's fathers, most of whom die in wars or accidents or from diseases that seem to prove Hobbes correct that human life is "nasty, brutish, and short." But with this story Kehlmann may show novelist Friedland overreaching in his pessimism, for it is difficult to believe one family could suffer every sling and arrow of the outrageous fortune that besets them. In addition, although one of Arthur's sons dies young in an almost accidental act of violence, the other two brothers manage to muddle through their failures. And near the novel's end, even Arthur earns some empathy when he takes an interest in his only grandchild and saves her from the funhouse. Despite all of the characters' disavowals of conventional morality and the novel's resistance to traditional narrative, F has something like a humane and happy ending. Its last word is "Faith"; it's not a Rubik's Cube solution, but it is a resolution.

Or maybe not. Characters seem to think that ending is due to Fate, another f-word emphasized late in the novel with a capital F. What there is of plot moves by misplaced phone calls, confused identities (Eric and Ivan are identical in appearance, several minor characters are named Ron), and coincidences, some occurring on the same August day in 2008, so chance is more likely (unless chance is another name for fate). But Martin believes the Church is a godlike Fate for him, and Eric believes the worldwide economic meltdown exists to save him from criminal prosecution, so they are comforted and optimistic about the future. But readers of F know more than the Friedland sons. They, as well as their kinder, gentler father at the end, are "fated" to do what they do and believe what they believe by Kehlmann, the First and Final Cause in this book that frequently delves into theology and ontology for conundrums about human freedom. Readers of realistic fiction may want to believe that character is fate and that characters take over a story and dictate their own plots, but game master Kehlmann suggests those beliefs are wishful thinking.

All fiction is like the ancient Lying Cretan paradox attributed to Epimenides, the Cretan who said, "All Cretans are liars." Novels that pretend not to be lies try to mesmerize readers. Ivan says that all art "was trying to be hypnotic." F and Kehlmann's three other novels that have been translated into English admit they are lies and yet still manage to elicit varying degrees of belief and affect. Oddly, the books seem honest for admitting they are games. But are the novels "high literary achievements" or novelty acts like "The Great Lindemann"? Born in 1975, Kehlmann was widely published and acclaimed at a very early age in Germany. All of his novels in English are about — one more f-word — fame. His most accomplished, Measuring the World, features two ample historical characters who give ballast and balance to Kehlmann's narrative play. By comparison, the characters of F, while realistic enough, are truncated. The scientists of Measuring the World are intellectually advanced, highly achieved, and complex figures. In F Kehlmann appears to be cherry-picking the surface of contemporary fraudulence, especially in his Ponzi man, Eric, who receives the most detailed attention. The priest and artist seem to be included to fill out a triptych of guilty game players. F feels somewhat overdetermined and underdeveloped, abstractly true and formally intriguing but not passionately felt.

Measuring the World made Kehlmann world famous: it was a huge bestseller in Germany and was translated into numerous languages. I hope that in the future — these f-words keep recurring — Kehlmann, not yet forty and the author of other books not yet translated, will slow down and bear down as he did in Measuring. I know he's not writing for me, and I'm not asking him to compose another historical novel, but I want his next work to be like the teeter-totter of Measuring the World. Some of the time readers of that novel are in thoughtful equipoise, other times up in the air with the author's ingenious inventions and then down on the ground with the novel's weighty factuality, up and down, balanced, up and down, whee and whoa. It's a childish game, of course, but not such a bad model for a Lying Cretan.

Tom LeClair is the author of five novels, two critical books, and hundreds of essays and reviews in nationally circulated periodicals. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Reviewer: Tom LeClair

The New York Times Book Review - Joseph Salvatore

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…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.

From the Publisher

Elegant. . . . A subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube. . . . With its sly Möbius-strip-like connectedness, [it] doesn’t just hint at the possibility of a plan behind the scenes; it enacts that plan in the very telling.” —The New York Times Book Review 

“A lollapalooza of a family comedy, diabolically intricate in its layering of concurrent narratives and dryly hilarious at every mazelike turn. . . . F is splashed with vivacious, hilarious characters and incidents that, with distance and time, transmogrify into something quite sinister indeed.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Kehlmann’s strange and endlessly provoking novel . . .  [is] not merely clever but suggestive and powerful. . . . But the deepest delights—delights that offer consolation in a faithless or fake world—are to be found in the novel’s beautiful and cunning construction, and in its brilliantly self-interrogating form.” —The New Yorker

“Kehlmann’s . . . 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. . . . [His] rendering of life’s mysteries . . . allows the reader a window to another world.” —NPR, All Things Considered
 
“Each son’s tale reads like a satisfying novella, and the three eventually dovetail in a way that surprises without feeling overdetermined. . . . [Kehlmann] shows off many talents in F. He’s adept at aphorism, brainy humor and dreamlike sequences. And he keeps the pages lightly turning while musing deeply.” —The New York Times
 
“A rich, absorbing and well-orchestrated narrative.” —Boston Globe
 
“A comic tour de force, a biting satire on the hypnotised world of artificial wants and needs that Huxley predicted, a moving study of brotherhood and family failure, F is an astonishing book, a work of deeply satisfying (and never merely clever) complexity. . . . Yet F is also much more than an intricate puzzle: it is a novel of astonishing beauty, psychological insight and, finally, compassion, a book that, in a world of fakes and manufactured objects of desire, is the real article, a bona-fide, inimitable masterpiece.” —The Times Literary Supplement (London)
 
“The hallmarks of [Kehlmann’s] style are speed, wit and a nuanced appreciation of the absurd. . . . He’s a specialist in the kind of irony that tells us more about a character, and ourselves, than sincerity ever could.” —Guernicamag.com
 
“A testament to the fact that conceptual novels need not be devoid of people and that family novels need not be devoid of ideas and that some darkly funny, smart absurdity is always a good idea.” —Flavorwire
 
“A tightly constructed exploration of filial tension and adult struggle. . . . As Kehlmann’s characters lay bare their troubled souls, we get a view that is comic and affecting.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
“What a strange and beautiful novel, hovering on the misty borders of the abstract and the real. Three brilliant character studies in the brothers—religion, money and art—what else is there? The answer, Kehlmann suggests, without ever saying so, is love, and its lack is the essence of the failures of all three. But while these fates unroll in the idiom of psychological realism, there is a cooler geometry working on the reader, a painterly sense of the symmetry in human fates. It’s a deeply writerly novel with a stout backbone of wonderful characterization. High achievement.” —Ian McEwan
 
“With the wizardry of a puzzle master Daniel Kehlmann permutes the narrative pieces of this Rubik’s Cube of a story—involving a lost father and his three sons—into a solution that clicks into position with a deep thrill of narrative and emotional satisfaction. Kehlmann is one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today, and he manages all this while exploring matters of deep philosophical and intellectual import.  He deserves to have more readers in the United States.” —Jeffrey Eugenides
 
“An intricate, beautiful novel in multiple disguises: a family saga, a fable, and a high-speed farce. But then, what else would you expect? Daniel Kehlmann is one of the great novelists for making giant themes seem light.” —Adam Thirlwell

Kirkus Reviews

2014-06-05
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 close—in fact, they scarcely know each other at all—but their appearance with their father that afternoon in some ways informs the rest of their lives. The unemployed Arthur boasts to Lindemann: "You can’t 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 he’ll be away a long time. The narrative then shifts to Arthur’s sons, now grown men. Martin has converted to Roman Catholicism and become a priest. (He's also an expert solver of the Rubik’s Cube puzzle and participates in national contests.) Eric becomes a fraudulent investor who can’t 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169898163
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	08/26/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.

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