F: A Novel

by Daniel Kehlmann, Carol Janeway (Translator)

Overview

From the internationally acclaimed author of Measuring the World, here is a dazzling tragicomedy about the three sons of a lost father.

Arthur Friedland is a wannabe writer who one day takes his sons to a performance by the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. Arthur declares himself immune to hypnosis and a disbeliever in magic. But the Great Lindemann knows better, and after he extracts Arthur’s deepest secrets and tells him to make them real, Arthur empties the family bank account and vanishes. He goes on to become a world-famous author, a master of the mystical. (F is for fake.) But what of his abandoned boys? The painfully shy Martin grows up to be a priest without a vocation. (F is for faith, and lack of it.) Eric becomes a financier on the brink of ruin (F is for fraud), while Ivan, hoping for glory as a painter, instead becomes a forger. (F is for forgery, too.) During the summer before the global financial crisis, they are thrown together again with cataclysmic results. Wildly funny and heartbreaking, Daniel Kehlmann’s novel about truth, family, and the terrible power of fortune is a fictional triumph.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804171595
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/04/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Berlin and New York. His works have won the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages and is one of the greatest successes in postwar German literature.

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.
(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "F"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Daniel Kehlmann.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Interviews

A Conversation with Daniel Kehlmann, Author of F: A Novel

Magic (particularly hypnosis) plays a major role in F. Do you have a personal interest in and/or knowledge of magic?

Yes, I was actually a magician for a while when I was about twenty years old. I was serious about it, and for a few weeks (maybe even longer) I thought about turning it into a profession. Then I wrote a novel about a magician instead ("Beerholms Vorstellung", not published in English), and strangely - after that I had lost my interest in doing magic myself. In some weird way I got rid of the whole obsession by writing about it. Sometimes I feel sad about that.

Your three protagonists are brothers, all with very different paths (one is a priest, another is a business man, and the third is an artist), and their relationships with each other, and their estranged father, is of great importance in this book. How did you come up with these characters whose only link (it seems) is their blood? What does the notion of family really mean?

The notion of family means whatever we, as a society and as individuals, decide it should mean. It's a fiction, and like many fictional things it can be of tremendous importance to our lives. About the characters: I really wanted to write a character-driven novel. That was a new thing for me, I had never tried that before, so it took me several false starts and detours to find out who the three brothers really were, what professions and milieus they were in and what each one's particular problems were. And I also wanted to write about the phenomenon of twins. I was always fascinated by that: My twins have a lot of telepathic communication going on between them, they share thoughts, ideas, even dreams, but often they don't find out about it. Only the reader will know.

In F, you describe a few of the same scenes through different points of view. How did you decide which scenes to repeat via multiple perspectives?

That was a lot of fun! Isn't it amazing how in life the same conversation can mean completely different things to the two people who are parts of it, how many wrong notions of each other and misunderstandings are just a normal part of everyday conversations? I felt that this is something you can really do in a novel (and not on TV, for example) - coming back to the same situation and describing it through the eyes of a different person, giving the reader that other person's thoughts and fears and ideas. The most important scene in regard to this is a lunch Martin, the priest, has with his brother Eric. Martin analyzes a lot, he thinks he has a very clear picture of his brother and his thoughts and preoccupations. And then, much later, we go back to that scene, and it turns out everything Martin assumed was wrong - and Eric is just plain mad.There is an interesting section in the middle of the book that leaves the present and throws the reader into an extreme time warp by tracing the brothers' family back through many generations. How did you get the idea to do this?

It started out as a parody of the information overkill you get from traditional family novels. They always tell you loads of things about uncles and aunts and parents and grandparents, and often you are really not that interested and just want to get back to the main story. So I decided to write a chapter of meaningless information about the family going back to the middle ages. It was all supposed to be very experimental. But then it developed into a completely different direction: It became very serious and quite bleak. If you sum up people's lives in short paragraphs like that every single one of them turns into a story of disaster, suffering, sickness and death. It's really terrible. But it's also still funny, in a rather dark way. So I decided to go ahead, and then I handed the chapter over to one of my characters, the writer Arthur Friedland. Now it's his story, not mine any more. Well, it's still mine, I guess.What are some major authors (living or deceased) whose work you channel in your writing?

I was, I am and I always will be very much influenced by Vladimir Nabokov - but then who isn't? For F I was also quite influenced by Roberto Bolano - the openness of his novels, the daring ability to not turn them into something round and clear and conventional. I think without Bolano "F" would have turned out quite a different book. I am also very much influenced by Voltaire. His style was quite important for the style of Measuring the World, and I think F still bears the marks of his dark funniness.

What's next for you?

I am writing a new play and a new novel. I think the play will be finished earlier. But the most important thing is the novel.

Who have you discovered lately?

The wonderful, funny and brilliant Geoff Dyer. I loved Out of Sheer Rage. It's one of the best books about the writer's life ever written. Right now I'm reading his new book Another Great Day at Sea, and I am enjoying it a lot. He is very funny in a slapstick kind of way, but at the same time he is such a brilliant stylist, that even when he makes fun of himself he does it in such a beautiful way that it can take your breath away. The book is about an aircraft carrier, and I am absolutely not interested in aircraft carriers, and I don't think he is really interested. It's just a perfect exercise in beauty, wit and perfect style. How can you not love that.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

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

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.

The New York Times Book Review - Joseph Salvatore

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.

Kirkus Reviews