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The only thing that story actually demonstrates is that everyone had the same kind of shoes, and he’s just being a really mean prankster.” “I was about 7 years old when I heard this story at school, which was presented to us as something didactic, as if Tyll is showing people their folly,” Kehlmann says. It’s great to write about, but of course you wouldn’t want to spend even an hour in this world.”Īt one point, Tyll goads the residents of a German village to take off their shoes, throw them into the air and then reclaim the ones that belong to them - watching with amusement as a brawl ensues. “In a way, it’s a serious literary experiment in trying to imagine what the world was like before the Enlightenment,” he says, “what was it really like to live in a world before Voltaire, Newton and all these people. With “Tyll,” Kehlmann envisioned something darker, about wars of religion and the impotence of statecraft. “Measuring,” which is set in the late 18th century, follows the adventures of two historic Germans - naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss - as they set out to measure the world from its highest mountain to its deepest cave. “When I wrote ‘Measuring the World,’ I told myself: ‘This is an experiment, I’m never going to write another historical novel.’” “It might sound very weird now, but I actually don’t like historical novels,” he says. But for a long time it was a novel that Kehlmann, who turned 45 in January, was reluctant to write. Kehlmann’s eighth novel and the sixth one to come out in English, “Tyll” is also his second book of historical fiction, following his 2005 bestseller “Measuring the World.” “Tyll” has either been or is being translated into more than 20 languages. Tyll travels through a Europe devastated by conflict, encountering fraudsters, soldiers and royalty, including Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, whose love of Shakespeare chimes with Tyll’s own sense of theatrical spectacle.

“Tyll” transmits the 14th-century tale of jester Tyll Ulenspiegel about 300 years into the future, plopping him into the Thirty Years’ War. It has sold nearly 600,000 copies in Germany since it was published there in 2017, and is being adapted by Netflix as a television series. For example: “Tyll,” his latest book, which Pantheon will publish in an English translation by Ross Benjamin on Feb. It was the kind of caper that he might have written into one of his novels, where escape artists, pranksters or con men often outwit their adversaries. When Daniel Kehlmann read the news that former Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn, facing financial misconduct charges in Japan, fled the country in a box, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of admiration. In His New Book, Daniel Kehlmann Says Hello to a Cruel World

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