Fame
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Imagine being famous. Being recognised 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 no one spoke your language and you didn’t speak theirs. Where no one knew your face and you had no way of contacting your home and family. How would your fame help you then? What would happen if someone got hold of your mobile phone? If they spoke to your girlfriends, your agent, your director and started making decisions for you. And when no one believed that you were you any more, when you saw a lookalike acting your roles for you, what would you do? And when you realised your magnum opus, like everything else you’d ever written, was drivel, a total waste of time and energy for all concerned, how would you react? Would the thought of the seven million people you knew would buy it and devour every word bring you comfort? Or would your shame only increase? In this delightfully entertaining joy of a book, Daniel Kehlmann throws his characters into all these situations with thrilling, funny and surprising results, showing once again that he is one of his generation’s finest European writers.
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
This novel of nine interconnected stories is a brilliant study of life and literature – playful, witty, and fun to read at the same time. In his intelligent novel the award-winning author Daniel Kehlmann reflects the fragility of life, questions of identity and the influence of Fame on people’s lives, in nine interconnected stories. Handles one of the most current topics: the paradoxes of celebrity, in a strikingly comic way. 9 stories linked by their subject, a play on the author’s identity.