F (a novel)
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Artful and subversive, F tells the story of the Friedland family – fakers, all of them – and the day when the fate in which they don’t quite believe catches up with them.
Having achieved nothing in life, Arthur Friedland is tricked on stage by a hypnotist and told to change everything. After he abandons his three young sons, they grow up to be a faithless priest, a broke financier and a forger. Each of them cultivates absence. One will be lost to it.
A novel about the game of fate and the fetters of family, F never stops questioning, exploring and teasing at every twist and turn of its Rubik’s Cube-like narrative.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Carol
Brown Janeway
Carol Brown Janeway, a prize-winning editor, translator and foreign rights director at Knopf Doubleday, died on August 3, 2015. She was 71 years old. She was renowned in the publishing world for her dedication to literature in translation.
The first book she translated for Knopf after joining the publisher in 1970 was Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim. She also translated The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard, Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach, The Storm by Margriet de Moor, and Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, among others.
Carol Brown Janeway, a prize-winning editor, translator and foreign rights director at Knopf Doubleday, died on August 3, 2015. She was 71 years old. She was renowned in the publishing world for her dedication to literature in translation.
The first book she translated for Knopf after joining the publisher in 1970 was Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim. She also translated The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard, Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach, The Storm by Margriet de Moor, and Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, among others.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
How an encounter with a hypnotist changes the lives of a father and his three sons.
Daniel Kehlmann’s F delights on a highly philosophical level. F is several things at once: a family saga, a fable, a novel about faith, and first of all a great book about falsehood and truth.