Fame
A Novel in Nine Episodes by Daniel Kehlmann
translated by Carol Janeway
Pantheon, 192 pp., $24
The Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s most recent novel was a comic/philosophical fictionalization of the lives of two famous 19th-century German scientists, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss. It’s hard to imagine such a book gaining broad appeal, but
Measuring the World is a hugely appealing book, written with great vitality and wit, and it became a spectacular European bestseller. Kehlmann, who at 31 had already published several well-received books of fiction, was, to the extent that a 21st-century German novelist can be, famous. Now he’s written a novel called Fame. Though a few of its many characters are celebrities, its real subject is the nature
of reality.
Kehlmann demonstrated in Measuring the World that he could take up such potentially ponderous ontological concerns without boring or patronizing a general audience. He writes of Gauss, who has surveyed vast areas of Germany:
Sometimes it was as if he hadn’t just measured the region, but invented it, as if it had only achieved its reality through him. Where once there had been nothing but trees, peat bogs, stones, and grassy mounds, there was now a net of grades, angles, and numbers.
But Kehlmann also calls into question the ultimate value of natural science, mischievously planting a number of vivid dreams and hallucinations in the mind of ur-empiricist Humboldt, including visions of a sea monster and a flying saucer. By presenting such visions as no less real than the plants and animals and landscapes that Humboldt so carefully measures, Measuring the World comes to resemble, at certain points, a work of magical realism.
Fame also challenges the authority of perceived reality, but here displacements are caused not by sea monsters but by cell phones, not space ships but YouTube. The novel’s rhetoric isn’t subtle. “How strange,” opines one of its narrators,
that technology has brought us into a world where there are no fixed places anymore. You speak out of nowhere, you can be anywhere, and because nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true. If no one can prove to me where I am, if I myself am not absolutely certain, where is the court that can adjudicate these things? Real places anchored in space existed before we had little walkie-talkies and wrote letters that arrived in the same second they were dispatched.
As if to enact this Internet-era instability, Fame is divided into nine episodes, each with a different protagonist, which turn out to be connected in various clever ways, becoming more and more thoroughly intertwined as the novel progresses. One episode, for example, follows a successful and self-absorbed novelist, Leo Richter, from the perspective of his girlfriend Elisabeth, as he becomes increasingly frustrated with his hosts and audiences on a lecture tour in Latin America. When PEN officials invite him to make an appearance in Central Asia (“Turkmenistan, I think. Or Uzbekistan.”), he suggests they ask a friend of his, Maria Rubinstein, instead. The next episode is a metafictional conversation between Leo and a character from a short story he’s written. A later episode—one of the novel’s strongest—tells the story of Maria Rubinstein’s trip to the unnamed Central Asian country where, after her hosts abandon her, her visa expires, she is arrested, and she eventually comes to live as a sort of servant for a peasant family.
Rubinstein has fallen into what many other characters in Fame actively wish for: an alternate life. In the first episode, “Voices,” a computer technician, Ebling, discovers that the number of his new cell phone has long been assigned to a man named Ralf. At first Ebling hangs up on callers trying to reach Ralf, but after he discovers he has a similar voice, he starts pretending to be this mystery man, calling off important-sounding meetings and blindly juggling dramatic relationships with various women. By the end, Ebling’s own life, characterized by a stupid son and a wife who’s a “lousy cook,” comes to seem dully oppressive.
The narrator of another episode, “A Contribution to the Debate,” finds refuge from his otherwise bleak life in Internet forums. Known only by his online name mollwit (though in a later episode we learn his name is Mollwitz), he spends most of his workday online, gossiping about celebrities, perpetuating conspiracy theories, and insulting other anonymous posters. His boss asks him to speak at a telecommunications conference, but in the real world he is hapless, and his presentation is a disaster. At the end of the episode mollwit assesses his life thus:
All I have forever is me. Only right here, on this side. I’ll never get onto the other side, never. No alternative universe. Early tomorrow, back to work. Weather forecast terrible. Even if it were good, so what? Everything goes on the way it always has.
Fame is full of similarly bald thesis statements, and it suffers from them. Kehlmann touches so often on the apparently fluid nature of contemporary reality, and the danger of mistaking virtual worlds for the real world, that character and story often seem at the mercy of such ideas. Many of his ideas, moreover, fail to advance far beyond the received wisdom, and his most strongly stated points seem exaggerated and underexplored. How do traditional alternative realities like books and movies compare to newer ones like Internet forums? Can’t the Internet function as a useful extension of the “real world” rather than a ghostly alternative to it? Is anything you choose to imagine really, at bottom, true?
Measuring the World, though it was full of them, didn’t register as a novel of ideas. It moved too briskly, and was too attentive to the telling (and often comic and surprising) detail. Fame, too, is written with lightness and humor, and offers plenty of satisfactions, many stemming from its ingenious structure. But despite the many realities Kehlmann presents here, the world he has built to contain them is oddly insubstantial.
Andrew Palmer is a writer in New York.