F

Reviews

“A comic tour de force, a biting satire on the hypnotized 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 that reveals yet another side of a prolifically inventive writer who never does the same thing twice. That one of its central motifs is the Rubik’s Cube is highly apt…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.”

“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.”

“Some writers, such as Munich-born Daniel Kehlmann, pack just as powerful a punch with a small-scale event whose impact we know will have slow-burning but far-reaching repercussions.”

“[A] rich, absorbing, and well-orchestrated narrative.”

“[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.”

“Beautifully translated…Kehlmann’s prose is sophisticated and often dense, his 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 the reader…Thank the publishing gods, then, for the work of translators such as Carol Brown Janeway…So well attuned is Janeway to the author’s style and sensibility that I did not find a single false note in the entire book…Kehlmann’s rendering of life’s mysteries, and Janeway’s seemingly effortless brilliance as a translator allow the reader a window to another world, another language, as if looking (and listening) through clear, highly polished glass.”

“Steeped in magical realism, this novel introduces Austrian-German author Daniel Kehlmann to an American audience.”

“A clever, moving tragicomedy that meditates on the meaning of family, faith, fatherhood, and probably a bunch of other words that begin with f.”

“Both bizarre and bleakly humorous, a slim manifesto on the divide between people’s dreams and their destinies.”

“An elusive novel whose events remain cryptic and largely unexplained…German writer Kehlmann takes us on a strange and enigmatic journey here.”

“F is 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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’…translated deftly from the German by Carol Brown Janeway…ambitious…elegant.”

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