Double lives

Daniel Kehlmann’s novel-in-stories explores art, reality, and the series of identities we inhabit — and have thrust upon us

September 19, 2010|Amanda Katz, Globe Correspondent

In the Seneca Review a few years back, Chris Offutt provided a tongue-in-cheek definition of a burgeoning genre, the “novel-in-stories”: “A term invented solely to hoodwink the novel-reading public into inadvertently purchasing a collection of short fiction.”

“Fame,’’ by German-Austrian wunderkind Daniel Kehlmann, similarly bills itself as “a novel in nine episodes.” But this slim, funny, provocative book justifies its structure brilliantly. The novel-reading public should be so lucky as to get hoodwinked like this.

Kehlmann, born in 1975 and the author of seven other books, is huge in Germany. His 2005 novel, translated as “Measuring the World,’’ sold 1.4 million copies there. In calling this book “Fame,’’ then, Kehlmann knows whereof he speaks. No fewer than three of his characters are famous writers: Leo Richter, a literary prizewinner; Maria Rubinstein, a crime novelist; and Miguel Auristos Blanco, a blindingly successful purveyor of New Age pap whose books are seeded through the episodes like a “Where’s Waldo?’’ for adults.

Ultimately, though, fame is just a microcosm of Kehlmann’s broader subject. His book is about the double lives we lead — as people and characters, as celebrities and anonymous strangers, as perceived by others and experienced from within. As one adulterous man says, “I had never felt so strongly that I was made up of two people, or rather that I had split one and the same life into two different variants.” Be it painful or thrilling, every character here experiences a similar doubling — and this, Kehlmann implies, is an inevitable part of modern existence.

In the first episode, we meet Ebling, an ordinary computer technician whose cellphone suddenly starts ringing with dozens of calls for someone named Ralf. Bombarded with demands from Ralf’s lovers, colleagues, and friends, Ebling is initially annoyed. But soon he finds himself seduced by his power to derail Ralf’s meetings and break Ralf’s girlfriends’ hearts.

Written in lucid, amusing prose, this story is as surreal as a high-tech Kafka or Cortázar — except that we later learn in another story who Ralf is and why the phone system went awry. An international matinee idol, Ralf Tanner is trapped in a life as oppressive as his cellphone records suggest; as Kehlmann writes, “He had long suspected that the act of being photographed was wearing out his face.” When his cellphone suddenly goes silent, he becomes worried he doesn’t exist. As if compelled, he heads to an impersonators’ night at a bar, where he is told that his Ralf Tanner impression needs work. Soon, he discovers that someone more convincing has assumed his old life.