“Life in the Limelight - Wall Street Journal”

Life in the Limelight - Wall Street Journal

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 01:04 PM PDT

By PAUL GENDERS

It is not surprising that fame should be on Daniel Kehlmann's mind. The Munich-born author's 2005 novel, "Measuring the World," about the 19th-century scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, was a surprise commercial hit. Selling more than 1.5 million copies to date, the book has made Mr. Kehlmann the most successful young writer—he is in his mid-30s—in the German language.

In "Fame," his seventh work of fiction and the third to be translated into English, Mr. Kehlmann turns his attention to the present day and, one suspects, his own recent experiences. The results are dazzling, but in a manner that leaves you wondering if you haven't been hoodwinked.

At first glance, "Fame" comprises nine short stories. As you read, you discover these are not stand-alone narratives: bit-part characters in one story take center stage in another; someone blunders in one and the consequences are suffered in another by someone else entirely; you follow a character only to find she is the invention of a character from an earlier story, an author "of intricate short stories full of complicated mirror effects and unpredictable shifts and swerves that were flourishes of empty virtuosity." Mr. Kehlmann expects us to see the joke. The links between these nine narratives are intricately embedded, arise unpredictably and show their author is not short on technical flair.

The genesis of the opening story is the aforementioned blunder, a clerical mistake that leads to a white-collar family man, Ebling, being assigned the same telephone number as a film star, Ralf Tanner. This mistake is actually made, off-stage, in the eighth story, by the narrator of the seventh, an Internet-addicted telecommunications worker named Mollwitz.

When we meet Ralf Tanner, in the fourth story, he is ensnared in the bizarre chain of events that began when he suddenly stopped receiving telephone calls. But Tanner's phone has gone silent only because Ebling is answering his calls for him, back in the first story. Ebling, drunk on newfound power, repeatedly arranges late night liaisons with a female friend of Tanner's, and repeatedly stands her up; it is the actor who is eventually punished, violently attacked by the woman in a scene that is filmed by passersby and becomes an Internet sensation. From here, Tanner's decline only accelerates.

Fame

By Daniel Kehlmann
Translated by Carol Brown Janeway
(Quercus, 304 pages, £12.99)

For all the cross-connecting panache with which Ralf Tanner's fall is achieved, and though Mr. Kehlmann offers amusing satirical details along the way, the final moral is unremarkable. Fame, the author informs us, is flimsy, easily counterfeited and no guarantee of happiness. Mr. Kehlmann's virtuosity looks here to be in the service of a sentiment too commonplace, surely, to deserve it.

A second narrative strand, concerning a Paulo Coelho-like author of New Age philosophy, similarly has satirical bite and technical sparkle, but again conforms to an ordinary, cautionary curve. The works of Miguel Auristos Blanco, "the writer venerated by half the planet and mildly despised by the other," reappear throughout "Fame," read and espoused by its characters. The book's sixth story finds Blanco contemplating suicide after realizing that his life's work is founded on a lie. The lie—that there is "an order in the world and life could be good"—has made him wealthy and famous, which tells you much, Mr. Kehlmann implies, about wealth and fame.

There are more famous writers in the book's third strand. On a lecture tour of Central Asia, the esteemed crime novelist Maria Rubenstein is cut adrift from her tour group; without money or a visa, she quickly descends into a hellish anonymity for which celebrity has not prepared her. No one in this strange unnamed land recognizes or understands Rubinstein, but were she not so feted in her own country she would not be here. Once more fame gets its comeuppance; but Rubinstein's story is told with such fairy-tale economy and eeriness you are inclined to forgive the predictability.

Rubinstein's friend Leo Richter, inventor of those "intricate," "empty" fictions, is also on a lecture tour, of Central America. Here he rages against the fame that has seen him invited across the world to speak to "brain-dead" admirers. It is tempting to see the neurotic, somewhat bipolar Richter as a self-portrait, however cartoonish, of the author; particularly so when he announces his wish to write "a novel without a protagonist . . . [possessing a] structure, the connections, a narrative arc, but no main character advancing throughout."

This, of course, describes "Fame." It also introduces a meta-fictional note to the book that swells into an intriguing theme. This theme—the powers and responsibilities of authorship—surfaces in a story about a terminally ill woman traveling to a Swiss suicide clinic. The story comes, we learn, from the pen of Richter, a point brought home arrestingly when the main character starts to plead with the author to let her live.

In the collection's final story Richter casts acquaintances from his Central American jaunt in another of his fictions. When his characters complain about losing their true identities, Richter decides to abscond from the story altogether, disappearing "above the sky and beneath the earth like a second-class God." "Fame" fools cleverly around its title subject, but is more puzzling and substantial when, as in these stories, it makes a subject of the author's power to fool.

Mr. Genders is is a freelance editor and writer based in London. His book reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

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