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From the internationally best-selling author of You Should Have Left, Measuring the World, and F, a return to historical fiction in this transfixing retelling of the German myth of Tyll Eulenspiegel--a story about the devastation of war and a beguiling artist's decision never to die.
Daniel Kehlmann masterfully weaves the fates of many historical figures into this enchanting and picturesque book of magical realism and adventure. It is the story of the 17th century vagabond performer and trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel that begins before he is enshrined in rumors and myths. We meet him as a scrawny boy growing up in a quiet village. When his father, a miller with an interest in alchemy and magic, is found out by the church, Tyll is forced to flee with the baker's daughter, Nele. They find safety and companionship with a traveling performer who teaches Tyll his trade. This begins a journey of discovery and performance for Tyll as he travels through a world devastated by the Thirty Year's War, and encountering along the way a young scholar, a hangman, the German poet Paul Fleming, a fraudulent Jesuit scholar, and the exiled royal couple Elizabeth and Frederick of Bohemia among many others--building his sardonic reputation all the while.
Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
"Located somewhere between German romanticism and modernism, superstition and science, history and high fantasy, this is a rapturous and adventuresome novel of ideas that, like Tyll's roaming sideshow, must be experienced to be believed." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Injecting gleeful dark humor into a setting that manages to feel both fantastically dystopian and historically grounded...[an] irresistible story." - Booklist (starred review)
"Kehlmann sometimes risks putting off readers with his intellectual gamesmanship. More often, he creates odd, darkly entertaining scenes...A richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters." - Kirkus Reviews
"This is a brilliant and unputdownable novel. Kehlmann is the true inheritor of the German fabulist tradition that stretches back to the Brothers Grimm and even further, and in the legendary prankster figure of Tyll Ulenspiegel he has found his perfect avatar." - Salman Rushdie
"A beautiful, engrossing and fascinatingly structured novel. Lucid, limpid, savage. Knowingly ahistorical. Romantically fictive. Cunningly layered. Tyll quietly intrudes on our present crisis of European identity. Have four centuries made us any wiser? This novel is a masterly achievement, a work of imaginative grandeur and complete artistic control." - Ian McEwan
"Kehlmann's imagination runs deep and wild. It travels with the currents of history, in its cycles of brutality and violence, it reaches into our own solitude and silence, summoning us, it soars far and high, and echoes with the power of myth." - Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive
This information about Tyll was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Michael Lionstar
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. He currently lives in Berlin and New York.
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