Authors and Genres

“Measuring the World”, a novel by thirty-four year old author Daniel Kehlmann, was a worldwide success, highly praised by both critics and readers. It successor, “Ruhm” (i.e., Fame), also has what it takes: subtly constructed and full of surprises.

In contemporary German literature Daniel Kehlmann is something like a superstar. His novel about the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß and the scientist Alexander von Humboldt, Measuring the World, sold approximately 1.7 million copies alone in the German-speaking world. The title of his new novel, Ruhm (i.e. Fame), is an ironic allusion to this success. The whole book is full of subtle irony and fine humour: artfully woven, polished and highly suspenseful.

Voices that don’t chime

Ruhm, according to its subtitle, is a “novel in nine stories”. In the first story, “Stimmen” (i.e., Voices), the main figure is the technician Ebling. After long hesitation, Ebling, whose life is about as exciting as a computer handbook, buys a mobile phone. Through an error, he is assigned the number of the actor Ralf Tanner and steps, little by little, into his shoes. Ebling tries out sentences and decisions which he would otherwise not have dared and for which he now need take no responsibility: a tremendous gain of excitement in a life whose previous pinnacle of happiness was a Wiener Schnitzel on the canteen menu. That Ebling accepts calls in Tanner’s name, but not in his sense, has tangible consequences for the actor, as the reader learns in a later story.

Other characters in Ruhm are the writer Leo Richter and the mortally ill Rosalie, a figure invented by Richter. She appears in a dialogue with her creator and pleads for mercy. The reader is also made acquainted with numerous staff of the mobile phone business, and the writer Miguel Auristos Blancos turns out to be Brazilian bestseller author Paulo Coelho. Even the devil himself has a small but not unimportant supporting role as the chauffer of stolen cars. The main theme of the novel is changing identity amidst the effects of modern communication technology and the confusing game of deception played between reality and fiction. The characters shuttle back and forth between superficial identities and sometimes literally wear themselves out in the transit.

What’s the use of a bestseller in central Asia?

In Winesburg, Ohio (1919), the writer Sherwood Anderson applied a method of narration that takes up an element or a character from one story in another, changes the perspective and so creates a larger whole. Among German writers, Ingo Schulze in Simple Storysy (1998) and Norbert Scheuer in Kall, Eifel (2005), for instance, adopted the same method. New in Ruhm is that Kehlmann explodes the unity of space. E-mails and mobile phones by-pass all distances in real time. And they lower the inhibition threshold for lying. The temptation to lead a double life is great: in Ruhm several characters soon succumb to it. Thus a department head can pretend that he is in Caracas while he is cheating on his wife in Hanover. Social commitments are afflicted by mobile phone connections.

Again and again accidents catapult various people into new identities. The whodunit writer Maria Rubinstein loses her tour group in central Asia; her mobile phone becomes useless, battery empty, recharger lost. The fame of the successful writer helps her precious little in her distress. Without money, without food and without knowledge of the local language, she is reduced to dumbly gesturing in a village shop, hungry and not understood. On a shelf, she discovers the Russian edition of her biggest-selling detective story. But without an author’s photo on the cover, she is unable to make clear that she wrote the book.

Daniel Kehlmann: Measuring the World

Discovering one’s own book in the remotest corner of the earth is something that could well have happened to Daniel Kehlmann. His Measuring the World has been translated into forty languages; in Taiwan, according to the author, the book was at the top of the bestseller list for thirty-five weeks. On the New York Times list of the world-wide biggest-selling novels in 2006, Measuring the World is number two, framed by Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress and Da Vinci Code. In China, the book even appeared with its German title because the Chinese publisher reprinted it without a license. Every “l” mutated into an “i”.

If Measuring the World has been so successful, it is surely because this novel about German intellectual history can also be read without its profound references as the amusing story of two dotty characters. Kehlmann has called its success a lottery jackpot which will now cross-subsidise all his future books. But Ruhm is not in need of that. It is a novel that, quite on its own, has what it takes to become a bestseller.