Synopses & Reviews
Imagine being famous. Being recognized on the street, adored by people who have never even met you, known the world over. Wouldn’t that be great?
But what if, one day, you got stuck in a country where celebrity means nothing, where no one spoke your language and you didn’t speak theirs, where no one knew your face (no book jackets, no TV) and you had no way of calling home? How would your fame help you then?
What if someone got hold of your cell phone? What if they spoke to your girlfriends, your agent, your director, and started making decisions for you? And worse, what if no one believed you were you anymore? When you saw a look-alike acting your roles for you, what would you do?
And what if one day you realized your magnum opus, like everything else you’d ever written, was a total waste of time, empty nonsense? What would you do next? Would your audience of seven million people keep you going? Or would you lose the capacity to keep on doing it?
Fame and facelessness, truth and deception, spin their way through all nine episodes of this captivating, wickedly funny, and perpetually surprising novel as paths cross and plots thicken, as characters become real people and real people morph into characters. The result is a dazzling tour de force by one of Europe’s finest young writers.
Synopsis
A man buys a cell phone and starts receiving calls intended for someone else; so begins this tale about fame and obscurity, truth and deception—full of surprise, humor, and brilliance.
After some initial hesitation, a man receiving someone else’s phone calls begins to play with his new identity. From one day to the next, an actor’s telephone falls dead silent, as though someone has stolen his life. A writer takes a pair of trips with a woman whose worst fear is to end up in one of his works. A somewhat confused Internet blogger wants nothing more than to become a character in a novel. A detective-story writer goes missing while on a journey through Central Asia, a fictional old woman on her deathbed quarrels with the writer who created her, and a managing director at a cell phone company goes crazy trying to manage his double life with two women.
In Fame, nine episodes coalesce to form a coherent whole as Daniel Kehlmann plays a sophisticated game with reality and fiction—creating, in essence, a dazzling hall of mirrors.
Synopsis
A man buys a cell phone and starts receiving calls intended for someone else--so begins this tale about fame and obscurity, truth and deception. After some initial hesitation, the man receiving someone else's phone calls begins to play with his new identity.
About the Author
Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages. Awards his work has received include the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Heimito von Doderer Literature Award, the Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Kehlmann divides his time between Vienna and Berlin.