Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann Review

Believe it not, this narrator. Its author is having its way with the history, reality, truth, and with us. And its creatures, the characters of this novel are cut from the same wood. But as entertaining, smart and attractive is the game that you will like to be led around by the nose. Thirty years war, the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism young, devastated central Europe. Especially the rural population was then stripped if not their lives of their livelihoods. The historical framework leaves our author untouched.

He describes some key events, some VIPs of the time come in person , some atrocities make us shudder, but they are not the focus.

At the center are the common people, its nature to be able to see through her life in an era whose bitter burden they carry, without its significance, let alone influence. In the center Tyll, the title character is, and with it begins Kehlmann’s fib on. Of course, she alludes to Till Eulenspiegel, the Schalk from the chapbook-world best-seller of 1510 or 1515, which exposed the weaknesses of his fellow men by taking their expressions at face value.

If he ever lived, so he likes born in 1300 in Kneitlingen and died in Mölln 1350th

Tyll has little to do with the three hundred years old rogue. He is a much more complex personality, has a proper biography and did not crack so many antics. Rather, he turns out to be cynical provocateur and commentator. According to its creator, he is a “demonic” shape.

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Tylls medium is a world that is falling apart, the departure from the persistent Middle Ages to modern times uncertain. His father Claus embodies the awakening curiosity is stifled by the old forces, for the reason that is still powerless, though fought with faith and superstition. Claus is interested in – more than for his work as a miller – for natural phenomena: the properties of the herbs, the running of the moon, time.

With his knowledge and with incantations he can heal minor illnesses. The people are grateful to him at first, but then he is scary to them, and they make him as guilty for all kinds of calamities from. How could they know that crop failures and famine were climatic conditions? The finishing off making Claus two by traveling scholars from whom he hopes for help in understanding a Latin book. But since he has come to the right people: The book is banned, the two are Jesuits, and so it is done to the man’s life. The interrogation is a gem dizzying argumentatio , which wanders from dragon’s blood between cope curved theology and outrageous references to magic, witchcraft and the healing powers, to underpin perfidious allegations.

Must now Tyll flee from his home, but he leads the enlightened spirit of his executed father in his luggage. With the young baker’s daughter Nele he joins he is a juggler troops to – traveling people, outlawed, lawless starvelings but free. In the villages, where marauding gangs can bring death daily, the entertainer can spend an afternoon the misery and multiple threats forgotten. The attraction of bawdy jokes that Tyll makes at the expense of the audience mingles with his person: Tyll is from another world, is one who “does what he wants … nothing believes and obeys no”. Enviable! “We realized that we would never be such people,” said the unknown to us consistent narrator.

However, his pranks amuse most Tyll itself. From the servant to the craftsmen who “always for something better held “are all villagers under his spell, obey mesmerized with his request:” Take off your shoes … … Each right throw him up … this will be a lot of fun! ” Is the chaos perfect Tyll fueled sentiment, insulted the “idiots” who, every turn in search of his property in a brawling bunch of discord. Finally the hatred they bore for so long in itself, discharges “to the reasons no longer knew.” Before its viewers (victim? Patient?) Come to their senses, to Tyll makes it, because “if you run faster than the others, you can pass anything.”

Kehlmann may Tyll career make. Like a jack-he appears now here, now there, and even the highest circles, he stops in front of the mirror. The Elector Palatine and Protestant Frederick V, although newly elected King of Bohemia, but from that he has nothing, because his opponent, the Catholic Habsburg Emperor, is overpowering. After only one year Friedrich’s going on not only the crown but also his Kurlande and will henceforth be derided as “Winter King”. His policy is driving Europe into war. Tyll accompanied Frederick wife Elizabeth, Mary Stuart proud granddaughter, humiliating their enterprises to set her husband back to his lost honors.

Many years later, even the Emperor stretched out his hand to the “famous jester” , Even if one does not know whether he was Protestant or Catholic, is such a something that should not spoil “priceless” for all the destruction. Count Wolkenstein (a descendant Oswald, the minstrel and diplomats), writes as an old man his report, as he should then Tyll Ulenspiegel track in Andechs and create to Vienna. As historical reality proves relative term. Boldly claiming plagued by all sorts of infirmities Count that everything “just war” as he describe it, and complained at the same time gaps in his memory. To patch up the vacancies, he mixes sovereign reliable and authentic, boldly invented and with the reliability of Flüsterpost Next passthrough.

The targeted stylization of literary language – “flowery digression”, “artfully nested sets” – to hide his insecurity. Especially the effect most passages are “untrue”. In the battle of zusmarshausen about, the last and highest losses of the Thirty Years’ War, Tyll has saved the Selva life. The pictures are liable even in the count memory, without being cast in language. Why not just write off from the best-seller “The Abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch”? Who cares that Grimmelshausen about the Battle of Wittstock, although eyewitness who could carry anything on paper and its description therefore abkupferte of Martin Opitz, who “had never been in life at a battle there” of course, and his report from an English novel borrowed he had translated itself?

As Wolkenstein and Tyll juggle Kehlmann artistically with fiction and reality (he has already done in his “measuring the world” with Humboldt and Gauss.). Baroque poet Paul Fleming looked over, even Dr. But degraded Athanasius Kircher, historically a versatile active polymath here for charlatan. His British companion Oswald Tesimond, also a Jesuit and somehow in the Gunpowder Plot involved, investigating the last true dragon he believed in Holstein. equal rights coexist reason and superstition, both united in the “witch-Commissarii” going about their sacred duty to “make the capital Supplicium the Malifikanten in place,” ie, “hangdog” to the right path, de facto, to the stake escort. .

As the Wunderkammer of a Renaissance prince gathered Kehlmann’s novel live plumper curious rarities, treasures and oddities of nature or the human spirit sprung. These include intellectual challenges such as palindromes (or equal to its extreme form, the “magic square”) and the question is which grains in a heap one that makes the collection of the “pile”. On the obvious temptation to paint the atrocities of war, Kehlmann does not fall in. He reveals how they creep into everyday life – such as a dragoon along the way dissolves the head of a goose with a shot to nothing. “Although the thick Graf would soon witness a lot on it, he should not forget his days, a horror what he went through to the core, burst as the head of the bird.”

Even some dialog can brutalization and ruthlessness recognize ( “I tear off his ears. I cut his finger off. I burn it”). transplanted here with his medium Tyll, from another time, Kehlmann is a literary masterpiece succeeded. He opened his eyes deep into the soul of a confused, misguided time in horror, but the arising picture puzzle, a game with reality and fiction, with history and fantasy, with the factual and mysterious. The foundation of Kehlmann style is the simple flowing syntax, the unpretentious, complex vocabulary, razor-sharp right word choice that skillfully effect-structuring.

For ease and aesthetic appeal makes its meaning for Playful, for fine Amusing, for light irony, for the unusual in the familiar, of humor when it is on ernstesten. Sepp, the servant who takes revenge for a dirty trick by throwing Tyll in the mill stream, and the child shoots in falling through the head, “from what he has been warned his life: not gate before the wheel in the creek, go never before, do not go in front of the wheel, under any circumstances never go, never, never go in front of the mill wheel in the creek “< This book – a great pleasure to read for literary gourmets – I have on the list Zu my.