About the Book
From the young, internationally acclaimed author of Measuring the World comes a stunning tragicomic novel about three brothers, their relationship to their distant father, and their individual fates and struggles in the modern world
One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something. Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes. In time, still absent from his family, he begins to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author. His sons grow into men who manifest their inexplicable loss--Martin becomes a priest who does not believe in God; Ivan, a painter in constant artistic crisis; Eric, a businessman given to hallucinations and a fear of ghosts--even as they struggle to understand their father's disappearance and make their own places in the world.
About the Author :
Daniel Kehlmann is a German-born author whose novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature.
Robert Fass is a veteran actor and twice winner of the prestigious Audie Award for the year's best narration. He has earned many Earphones Awards and AudioFile magazine "Best of the Year" accolades.
Jim Meskimen is a stage, film, and television actor who has appeared in many well-known movies and television shows. He acted in Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon for director Ron Howard, both of which were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. His television appearances include The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Friends, Lie to Me, Criminal Minds, and Parks and Recreation. He is also a painter, award-winning audiobook narrator, and audiobook director for Galaxy Audio.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible's Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible's Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People's Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Review :
"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, award-winning author of The Escape"
"[A] lollapalooza of a family comedy, diabolically intricate in its layering of concurrent narratives, and dryly hilarious at every mazelike turn...F is splashed with vivacious, hilarious characters and incidents that, with distance and time, transmogrify into something quite sinister indeed."
-- "San Francisco Chronicle"
"[A] rich, absorbing, and well-orchestrated narrative."
-- "Boston Globe"
"A clever, moving tragicomedy that meditates on the meaning of family, faith, fatherhood, and probably a bunch of other words that begin with f."
-- "Grantland"
"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 that reveals yet another side of a prolifically inventive writer who never does the same thing twice. That one of its central motifs is the Rubik's Cube is highly apt...Yet F is also much more than an intricate puzzle: it is a novel of astonishing 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."
-- "Times Literary Supplement"
"An elusive novel whose events remain cryptic and largely unexplained...German writer Kehlmann takes us on a strange and enigmatic journey here."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
"As with Thomas Pynchon's V, or Tom McCarthy's C, in Daniel Kehlmann's subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel, readers and characters alike exist for a time in that hazy uncertain land, where there is not only the desire but the need to solve for x--or, in Kehlmann's case, 'F'...translated deftly from the German by Carol Brown Janeway...ambitious...elegant."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"Beautifully translated...Kehlmann's prose is sophisticated and often dense, his musings on religion, art, and life are intellectually rigorous, and his plotting masterful in the linking of the story's separate narratives with overlaps that, when revealed, surprise and shock the reader...Thank the publishing gods, then, for the work of translators such as Carol Brown Janeway...So well attuned is Janeway to the author's style and sensibility that I did not find a single false note in the entire book...Kehlmann's rendering of life's mysteries, and Janeway's seemingly effortless brilliance as a translator allow the reader a window to another world, another language, as if looking (and listening) through clear, highly polished glass."
-- "NPR's All Things Considered"
"Both bizarre and bleakly humorous, a slim manifesto on the divide between people's dreams and their destinies."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Each son's tale reads like a satisfying novella, and the three eventually dovetail in a way that surprises without feeling overdetermined...[Kehlmann] shows off many talents in F. He's adept at aphorism, brainy humor, and dreamlike sequences. And he keeps the pages lightly turning while musing deeply."
-- "New York Times"
"Some writers, such as Munich-born Daniel Kehlmann, pack just as powerful a punch with a small-scale event whose impact we know will have slow-burning but far-reaching repercussions."
-- "Minneapolis Star-Tribune"
"Steeped in magical realism, this novel introduces Austrian-German author Daniel Kehlmann to an American audience."
-- "Barnes & Noble, editorial review"
"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. 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, Man Booker Prize-winning author"
"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 in the United States."
-- "Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize-winning author"
