The stories on the second track deal with a cellphone company that has mistakenly assigned the same phone numbers to multiple people, which plays havoc with identity in a world in which one’s words are largely disembodied. The former all involve the misanthropic Leo (don’t ask him where he gets his ideas) and his dealings with people who either fear becoming his characters or hope it happens. There is also the intriguing Lara Gaspard, whose rear-view mirror ubiquity builds her into a subject of much intrigue.Īll of the stories involve protagonists on the verge of identity switches, and they can be loosely placed into two groups: the metafictional and the non. The book is built around the novelist Leo, who in fact writes some of the stories we read in “Fame.” His foil is Miguel Auristos Blancos, a Brazilian author of pabulum loosely modeled on Paulo Coelho and whose New Age-y odes to greater consciousness pop up throughout the book. “Fame” bills itself, according to its subtitle, as “A Novel in Nine Episodes,” or, as one character puts it, “a novel without a protagonist … a narrative arc, but no main character, no hero advancing throughout.” Each of the nine stories is self-contained, though they interlock thematically, as well as in terms of plot and character. That’s no fluke: Bad sex aside, this author has built a reputation as a mordant postmodernist who combines the geeky adventure of Neal Stephenson with the icy wit that Paul Auster was once known for. “Fame,” Kehlmann’s only novel after “Measuring the World,” moved more than 100,000 copies in its first week of release last year in Germany. Kehlmann is the author of 2005’s “Measuring the World,” a vaguely Pynchonesque novel about 19th century mathematicians and explorers that has sold 1.5 million copies worldwide and collected a slew of awards. It begins with the narrator musing, “I desired her so much I would have given a year of my life.” Once coitus begins he finds that “my existence split into two halves: a before and an after, for all time.” As the ecstasy continues, the lovers become “so entwined that we could be one body or Siamese twins,” and, quite mysteriously, “we clutch each other as if we were swimming in the Sargasso Sea.”ĭespite a little too much writing like that, “Fame” is not a dismissible book. Daniel Kehlmann’s novel “Fame” includes what must be one of the most hackneyed sex scenes I’ve read this year.

Tyll daniel kehlmann