Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes Review

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Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes ReviewDaniel Kehlmann, who has published four novels and a short story collection by the age of thirty-five, has also won the 2005 Candide Award, the 2006 Kleist Award, and the 2008 Thomas Mann Award. This novel can only add to his luster. It is brilliant--clever, thoughtful, satirical, ironic, humorous, and beautifully structured within its experimental style. Non-stop fun at the same time that it deals with important existential issues, Kehlmann's collection of nine seemingly unrelated stories becomes a labyrinth of overlapping relationships, some of them within the plots of the stories, some in the surprising connections among characters, some through his imagery (and one repeating character/symbol), and some through his development of his themes.
Kehlmann is exploring the effects of technology on our perceptions of reality, and while this may sound esoteric and ponderous, it is done within a lively assortment of stories in which the characters and points of view are not only realistic and satiric, but usually wickedly funny. He raises questions about what happens to our definition of reality when we spend hours of our real lives "communicating" on the internet, often in chat rooms using monikers instead of real names, where we create whole new fictional lives for ourselves. We converse on cellphones, record cellphone videos, and sometimes post these on YouTube, allowing the world to share them. How "real" are all these versions of reality? And how "real" is the fame that often accompanies our recorded achievements in film, TV, and literature?
Kehlmann's nine stories all deal with the ironies of people caught between reality and fiction. In "Voices" Kehlman tells the story of Ebling, who is mistakenly assigned the private number of famous actor Ralf Tanner when he buys a new cellphone. When he begins to answer as the actor, "It was as if he had a doppelganger, his representative in a parallel universe." In "The Way Out," Ralf Tanner the actor illustrates what has happened to his life since Ebling started answering his phone calls, making him live under an assumed name. In "How I Lied and Died," the telecom supervisor of the man who mistakenly gave out Ralf's cellphone number becomes caught up in a lover's triangle in which he is in love with two women. He lies to both, creating fictional new "lives" for himself through his lies. Four episodes are about writers, one of whom, Leo Richter, has become famous for his stories about Dr. Lara Gaspard. He is now living with Elisabeth, a real doctor with Doctors Without Borders who does not want to tell him anything about her life because she does not want to appear in any of his stories.
Kehlmann writes like a sorcerer here, hiding fundamental metaphysical ideas within sentences which are simple, concise, and straightforward and within stories which are exciting to read. He never lets the reader forget that his own stories, too, must be evaluated---he is, after all, a real person telling fictional stories which reflect real themes using fictional characters, some of whom are fictitiously involved in writing books and some of whom are involved in telecommunications which affect their readers' real lives. "Stories within stories within stories. You never know where one ends and another begins!" Mary Whipple
Measuring the World: A Novel (Vintage)
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