F: A Novel

Awards:   Short-listed for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015 Shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015.
Author:   Daniel Kehlmann ,  Carol Brown Janeway
Publisher:   Quercus Publishing
ISBN:  

9781784296230


Pages:   272
Publication Date:   21 May 2015
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
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F: A Novel


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Awards

  • Short-listed for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015
  • Shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015.

Overview

Artful and subversive, F tells the story of the Friedland family - fakers, all of them - and the day when the fate in which they don't quite believe catches up with them. Having achieved nothing in life, Arthur Friedland is tricked on stage by a hypnotist and told to change everything. After he abandons his three young sons, they grow up to be a faithless priest, a broke financier and a forger. Each of them cultivates absence. One will be lost to it. A novel about the game of fate and the fetters of family, F never stops questioning, exploring and teasing at every twist and turn of its Rubik's Cube-like narrative.

Full Product Details

Author:   Daniel Kehlmann ,  Carol Brown Janeway
Publisher:   Quercus Publishing
Imprint:   riverrun
Dimensions:   Width: 12.90cm , Height: 2.10cm , Length: 19.80cm
Weight:   0.235kg
ISBN:  

9781784296230


ISBN 10:   1784296236
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   21 May 2015
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

Reviews

'What a strange and beautiful novel, hovering on the misty borders of the abstract and the real ... High achievement' Ian McEwan. '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' Jeffrey Eugenides. 'F is an intricate, beautiful novel in multiple disguises: a family saga, a fable, and a high-speed farce ... Daniel Kehlmann is one of the great novelists for making giant themes seem light' Adam Thirlwell. 'A novel of deep beauty, psychological insight and, finally, compassion ... a bona fide, inimitable masterpiece' John Burnside, TLS. 'A mind-bending circularity is the basis of this compelling read ... Lacing comedy with menace, Kehlmann revels in a series of ingenious set pieces' Financial Times. 'A masterpiece that nobody should miss' John Burnside, New Statesman, Books of the Year.


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 ... It is a novel of deep 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 -- John Burnside Times Literary Supplement Daniel Kehlmann braided art, religion and finance into a typically effervescent but heartfelt comedy-of-ideas about faith and fakery Independent It is this sense of a world potent with significance that seems at once within our reach and beyond our grasp that forms the central concern of this most accomplished, humane and unsettling of novels - a work that registers how it is to feel so alive to the 'terrible beauty of things' as to feel the world is talking to us Literary Review Daniel Kehlmann's subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel ... conveying the implicit message that Fate with a capital F has already decided the answer for us ... Yet Kehlmann's ambitious narrative structure - the novel itself - provides the strongest rebuke of that deterministic claim. For the novel, with its sly Mobius-strip-like connectedness, doesn't just hint at the possibility of a plan behind the scenes; it enacts that plan in the very telling, its elegant, unfolding construction revealing the author's intended pattern by book's end; a sign of hope, perhaps, or even faith New York Times Intelligent, acerbic and quietly surreal ... Powering the narrative is the explosive fallout from the collision between fate and self-determination ... Subtle and clever in all the right ways. Kehlmann's world is fully convincing while being philosophically challenging. He has a hypnotic effect, seducing us with his storytelling while provoking us to find meanings of our own -- Toby Lichtig Saturday Telegraph It cannot be an easy thing to write a comic novel about the death of God. Still, Daniel Kehlmann may just have pulled it off ... In a godless world, love counts for a great deal. And failing love, ordinary human decency goes a long way. Since Kurt Vonnegut died, there has really been no one to tell us this; the reminder is welcome ... F is about the world's absurdity, and this makes a huge difference morally. The world is big, and ultimately unknowable, and life is short and memory pitifully limited ... It is very hard to express how funny this all is. But laughter matters most in the dark -- Simon Ings Guardian 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 men. 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 -- Ian McEwan 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 -- Jeffrey Eugenides 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 -- Adam Thirlwell Compelling combination of digestible philosophy and buzzy page-turning thriller ... the ideas in this book are big, exciting, an irresistible puzzle, and the prose flows like the Rhine - increasingly dramatic, occasionally soulful. F might be for Friedland and family and fraud but it is also for fun. And a fecking good read Big Issue


Author Information

Author Website:   http://www.kehlmann.com/

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Vienna, Berlin and New York. He has published six novels: Measuring the World, Me & Kaminski, Fame, F, You Should Have Left and Tyll and has won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Doderer Prize, The Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature.

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Author Website:   http://www.kehlmann.com/

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