Daniel Kehlmann masterfully weaves the fates of many historical figures into this enchanting work of magical realism and adventure. This account of the seventeenth-century vagabond performer and trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel begins when he’s a scrawny boy growing up in a quiet village. When his father, a miller with a secret interest in alchemy and magic, is found out by the church, Tyll is forced to flee with the baker’s daughter, Nele. They find safety and companionship with a traveling performer, who teaches Tyll his trade. And so begins a journey of discovery and performance for Tyll, as he travels through a continent devastated by the Thirty Years’ War and encounters along the way a hangman, a fraudulent Jesuit scholar, and the exiled King Frederick and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia.
Tyll displays Kehlmann’s remarkable narrative gifts and confirms the power of art in the face of the senseless brutality of history.
Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 11, 2020 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593170304
- File size: 344331 KB
- Duration: 11:57:21
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from October 21, 2019
The latest from Kehlmann (Measuring the World), is a rollicking historical picaresque that follows the legendary trickster, acrobat, juggler, and jack-of-all-trades Tyll Ulenspiegel as he and his company make their way through a 17th-century German countryside gutted by the Thirty Years’ War. After his father, a miller in a small village, is executed by the Jesuits for heresy (courtesy of an unusually sympathetic hangman), the young Tyll escapes with his adopted sister, Nele, and becomes pupil to the wandering (and treacherous) entertainer Pirmin. Tyll’s ensuing adventures unfold over the course of eight distinct episodes resembling folktales, some of which put the canny Tyll in the foreground, while others feature him only as a witness to the main action. In this manner, readers meet the fat count Martin von Wolkenstein en route from the Viennese court in the thick of battle and encountering a slyly mocking Tyll in the forest; next, Tyll appears in the Hague as the court fool of the so-called “Winter King” Friedrich V and his queen in exile from their kingdom in Bohemia; and two unlikely traveling companions, the great mathematician Adam Olearius and the occultist Dr. Kircher (who is searching the land for dragon’s blood in order to cure the plague), find themselves guests of Tyll, Nele, and Origenes, their talking donkey—and these are just a few highlights. Located somewhere between German romanticism and modernism, superstition and science, history and high fantasy, this is a rapturous and adventuresome novel of ideas that, like Tyll’s roaming sideshow, must be experienced to be believed.
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