Review: "Fame" by Daniel Kehlmann

Fame by Daniel Kehlmann is a wonderful little treat of a novel for anyone who likes puzzles that are easily navigable but still might not have a clear conclusion. Reading it I felt a bit nostalgic to when I first started reading heavily. Its story immediately took me back to the times when I read all of Paul Auster’s available works over the course of the summer. Like Auster, Kehlmann inverts the form of the novel, where stories and being told are sometimes part of something else much bigger than what you are reading, and you only find this out later on, which could be in a few pages or a few hundred pages. That is why I like these kinds of novels, which I really don’t know what the clinical term for them is, because they offer a new kind of experience from an author to author, book to book, or even a chapter by chapter basis, and they are the rare kind of books that can work well at any length, whether they are to read in one sitting or over the course of a holiday. This is a slim book, at 175 pages, and it is still able to have an impact of something that might be two or three times bigger. It is also a kind of book that tackles big subjects, but never in a heavy handed or didactic way. They have moral lessons, but revel in twists and turns that can leave you breathless. This one in particular is a novel in nine short vignettes that revolve around the celebrity Ralf Tanner, whose cell phone number ends up being given to Ebling, a lowly computer tech, who is at first annoyed by the calls meant for Ralf, but slowly begins to take them and dictate Ralf’s life, causing a chain reaction throughout the lives of seemingly unconnected people. A writer misses a conference due to his increasingly erratic behavior witnessed by his new mistress; the person who replaces him ends up lost and derelict in the town she was staying due to some really harsh twists of fate. Ralf himself is able to walk away from his life when an impersonator of his starts taking his jobs, and someone keeps arguing with the writer who is telling their story and controlling their life. It all adds to an ending that is may be irritating in its ambiguity, but still stunning in its execution. It was an ending that again reminded me of the shorter novels of Paul Auster, such as Oracle Night and Man in the Dark. It is just really cool to read something like this, that never talks down to its reader or intentionally tries to give them headaches, but challenges them to connect the dots throughout the separate but veiled connections made between characters and events. You may not make all the connections or catch all the tiny details, but I am willing to bet you won’t have more fun piecing together a puzzle than you did reading this.

Rating: 5/5