In Beerholms Vorstellung, the protagonist magician was caught up in daydreams which seamlessly turned into reality, and of course the German "Vorstellung" can mean "stage show" as well as "imagination" in Der fernste Ort, we realise at the end of the novel that we have not been witnessing the actions of a man who is trying to start a new life, but his hallucinating visions as he finds himself in a struggle to escape death by drowning Ruhm is a literary tesseract in which fictional and metafictional layers exist at once F invites the reader himself to figure out things for which there is no answer. He is original as a writer perhaps not so much for his range of topics (it appears this interplay is all he thinks about) but for the number of different ways he finds to approach his subject. By now, I have read almost everything he wrote, and I have come to think that Daniel is mostly interested in the interplay between "reality" and "perception", between what things "are" and what they are perceived to be. Anybody who likes or dislikes Kehlmann enough to have read all, or most, of his work will find this interesting. The two lectures are a treasure trove of insights into Daniel's mind. As a practical tip up-front: Don't buy these! They would be well worth the money, but they are published in Lob - über Literatur, a collection of essays on literature, so you get these "free" when you buy that one. This little volume contains two lectures on literature which Daniel delivered at the University of Göttingen in November 2006.
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