It took me a while to learn how to work with comic effects. It took me a while to understand that if in life I like to laugh about things, then I should try to get that side of myself into the books. I was one of these writers who feel that the funny and playful part of their personality is the part they should leave out of the books because literature is serious business. I published my first novel when I was 22. So my first question would be: Are you comfortable with being called a comic novelist?ĭaniel Kehlmann: Yes, I am. And then you have the third brother working as an art forger in the art world, which is a pretentious and phony place where people are doing pretentious and phony and craven things. Another one is an investment banker who’s trying to conceal from everyone in his life that his business is going down in flames – another classic comic situation. One of the three brothers at the center of it is this grossly overweight priest who can’t stop eating and doesn’t believe in God. But for me the actual experience of reading the book was page after page of comedy. It may be my favorite thing of yours yet, although I’m also a huge fan of "Fame." It seems like this is a novel about a genuinely serious philosophical question - why our life takes the particular path it does - and about the weirdness of being inside a life while it’s taking the turns it does. Jonathan Franzen: I want to start by saying I’m a big fan of this book. What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation he and I had by phone last month. In his collection of linked stories, "Fame" (published in 2010 in the U.S.), and even more in his new novel, "F," Daniel has become the go-to guy in Central Europe for engagement with the weirdness of the postmodern world we inhabit. He soon became a good friend (later also a collaborator on a translation project of mine), and it's been a pleasure, over the past nine years, to see him further blossom as a storyteller.
He was ridiculously young, ridiculously well read for being so young, and ridiculously nice. I met Daniel Kehlmann in Vienna in 2005, on the night before German sales of his novel "Measuring the World" went ballistic.
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