F
A Novel
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
'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' - John Burnside
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.
**Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015**
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three brothers struggle to find their place in the world in this novel from German author Kehlmann (Fame). Middling writer Arthur Friedland spends his days penning novels no publisher would print and his off-hours devising ways to entertain his three sons: identical twins Ivan and Eric, and an older son, Martin, from a previous marriage. One afternoon, the foursome go to see "The Great Lindemann," a hypnotist whose words of advice prompt Arthur to go home, empty his bank account, and vanish, emerging years later as a successful, if eccentric, author. Meanwhile, Martin, Ivan, and Eric spend the next few decades dealing with their feelings of abandonment. Martin has become a shiftless priest who doesn't believe in God; painter Ivan feels disillusioned with the very concept of art; and money manager Eric is losing both his mind and his Ponzi scheme of a business. Together, the hapless trio face their existential crises. Kehlmann sometimes presents the same scene from different brothers' perspectives, thereby illuminating their skewed experiences of the world. The novel that emerges is both bizarre and bleakly humorous, a slim manifesto on the divide between people's dreams and their destinies.
