FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews FameBy Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Carol Brown Janeway Quercus, 175pp. £12.99
AND NOW FOR something completely different. The German-born, Austrian-based writer Daniel Kehlmann takes the concept of fame and tosses it into the air. The result is a lively, inventive entertainment born of variations on a theme. His new novel – his sixth, and the third to be translated into English – is presented as "a novel in nine episodes". It's not a novel: it's a collection of loosely interconnected stories, several of which are very good; two are outstanding. Already established as a bestselling writer through the international success of Measuring the World, Kehlmann is clever, original and very funny. Among his many strengths are his comic timing and a laconic tone, both of which have been brilliantly rendered by Carol Brown Janeway, who also translated Measuring the World(2007) and Kehlmann's Me and Kaminski(2008), as well as Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Lostand Sándor Márai's forgotten classic, Embers.
In the opening story an unsuspecting technician reluctantly purchases his first cell phone. Ebling is practical. “Why did nobody wonder about whether it was a good idea to clutch a powerful source of radiation to your head?” But as his family needs to be able to contact him he bought one. “And now, without warning, it was ringing.” The calls begin to come, fast and insistent and all for a man named Ralf, a famous actor with a complicated love life. When Ebling complains that he has been given a number that already belongs to someone else he is assured that such an error is impossible. He continues to receive calls for Ralf with such regularity that he realises he would like to know more about Ralf’s life: “After all, it was now, to a small extent, his life too.” The calls continue, and Ebling gets to thinking: “Why did some people get everything and other people almost nothing? Some people achieved so much and other people didn’t, merit had nothing to do with it.” He begins to take notes of the names of the women that, by virtue of them thinking he is Ralf, he is involved with.
Elsewhere Elizabeth, an aid doctor, begins to regret letting a writer friend come with her on a mission to Africa. The writer has a fear of flying; the doctor already realises that she looks like the writer's famous fictional heroine. The doctor and the writer reappear in the final story. This time the situation is very tense, as the doctor knows she will be dealing with the wounded survivors left by murderers she has to depend on. No one is speaking much, but the writer, enthralled, is oblivious to the danger and asks no one is particular: "Have you read Hemingway? I think about him all the time here. Can you work here withoutthinking of him?"
Ralf the actor reappears. Suddenly his phone no longer rings, and he has to give way to the various impersonators who have become better at being Ralf than Ralf is. He has been troubled for a while, though: "He had long suspected that the act of being photographed was wearing out his face. Was it possible that every time you were filmed, another person came into being, a less-than-perfect copy that ousted you from your own presence?" By the time Ralf is being comforted by a sympathetic Ralf impersonator – who explains: "Often when I'm in the street I don't even notice that I'm doing Ralf Tanner. I liveas him. I think like him, sometimes I stay in character for days at a time. I amRalf Tanner. It takes years" – you begin to feel sorry for him.
Kehlmann has a lightness of touch and handles absurdity with panache. He injects a playfulness here and there, and it works. He has the confidence of a very skilled stand-up comic. Not only is he exploring fame; he is also dissecting story. One of his characters is a terminally ill woman who wants to decide when she will die. She decides to go to a clinic in Switzerland. But first Kehlmann tells the reader about her: “Of all my characters, she’s the most intelligent.” He also admits: “I’m not really the kind of writer who uses real facts. Others like to be meticulous and nail down every single tiny detail, so that some shop that one of their characters is wandering past has the exact right name in the book. This sort of thing leaves me cold.”
In another story a woman who writes detective novels goes on a press junket to a Third World country in which everything goes badly wrong. Having been dispatched to a deserted hotel after four days of horror, she is left waiting for a lift to the airport and freedom. The taxi never arrives, and eventually she finds herself working on a farm, hoping to learn the local language and eventually save sufficient money to get home. It is quite brilliantly done, as is another story in which the narrator recalls how he became a liar the day he met another woman. By that time he already had a wife and two children but somehow forgot them in the first flush of sexual excitement. He then begins to tell so many lies to both women – lies that include killing off workmates who aren’t dead – that his head is ready to burst.
“I began to wonder if I was crazy. I woke up in the middle of the night, listened to the breathing of the woman next to me, and wondered for several anxious seconds not so much which one she was, but who I was at this moment and what labyrinth I’d strayed into.”
Measuring the Worldplays with history and celebrates the imagination on many levels. Fame, although slighter, reiterates Kehlmann's originality. Hardly a novel, but what matter? This stylish, conversational whimsy relentlessly skips towards the truth on so many levels that it seems this is a writer who need not keep to the rules.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of
The Irish Times
. She will be in conversation with Jennifer Johnston at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire at 3.45pm tomorrow as part of the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival
