DANIEL KEHLMANN’s works have won the Candide Prize, the
Hölderlin Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and
the Thomas Mann Prize. He was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B.
Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public
Library in 2016–17. Measuring the World has been translated into
more than forty languages.
ROSS BENJAMIN’s previous translations include Friedrich
Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Joseph Roth’s Job, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You
Should Have Left. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff
Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak,
Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim fellowship for his work on
Franz Kafka’s diaries.
**Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize**
“Profoundly enchanting but never sentimental, Tyll is a magnificent
story . . . Kehlmann is a master of economical, devastating
description . . . Chilling . . . In this exquisitely crafted novel,
Kehlmann moves just as nimbly through the grimmest of human
experiences. The result is a spellbinding memorial to the nameless
souls lost in Europe’s vicious past, whose whispers are best heard
in fables.”—Irina Dumitrescu, The New York Times Book Review
“Vivid . . . Kehlmann, a confident magician himself, plays his
bright pages like cards . . . Kehlmann is a gifted and sensitive
storyteller . . . Despite the grimness of the surroundings and the
lancing interventions of history, the novel’s tone remains light,
sprightly, enterprising. Kehlmann has an unusual combination of
talents and ambitions—he is a playful realist, a rationalist drawn
to magical games and tricky performances, a modern who likes to
look backward . . . At once magister and magician, he practices the
kind of novelistic modesty that can be found at the heart of
classic storytelling . . . Through this riven world, bristling with
boundaries both political and ideological, dances our slippery
survivalist, our great expansionist, Tyll—amoral, rebellious,
untrustworthy, and exciting . . . Brilliant.”—James Wood, The New
Yorker
“Prodigiously imaginative . . . [A] brilliant, blackly sardonic
retelling . . . In Mr. Kehlmann’s unforgettable joker we have a
picture of humankind in all of its madness and strutting
pride.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Kehlmann, like Tyll, is a trickster and his cheekiness is well
served by Ross Benjamin’s fluid, stylish translation . . . Rewards
close readers with grace notes and unexpected narrative connections
. . . Entertaining us like a jester on a tightrope and reminding us
of the danger of a fall.” —Jon Michaud, Washington Post
"Daniel Kehlmann’s narrative gift is so prodigious as to be almost
aggravating . . . The pleasures of this novel, not least it’s
crisp, adroit language, impeccably brought to English by translator
Ross Benjamin, can and should be enjoyed—right now."—The Arts
Fuse
“Tyll is a rollick and a delight . . . Ross Benjamin’s
translation is fluent and clever . . . Kehlmann himself performs a
tightrope act in the book: he walks the line between the invented
and the historical, the tragic and the comic, the ridiculous and
the sublime. He rarely stumbles, and he dismounts with a flourish.
I for one am eagerly awaiting his next performance.”—Matthew
Keeley, Tor.com
“Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll is a
laugh-out-loud-then-weep-into-your-beer comic novel about a war . .
. Ambitious, clever, tricksy, self-reflective . . . Tyll is also a
thoroughly contemporary novel. It is artful and ironic and
self-conscious . . . It’s operatic in its gestures and
heartbreaking in its absurdity. Kehlmann is at the top of his
game.”
—The Times (UK)
“This is a brilliant and unputdownable novel. Kehlmann is the true
inheritor of the German fabulist tradition that stretches back to
the Brothers Grimm and even further, and in the legendary prankster
figure of Tyll Ulenspiegel he has found his perfect avatar.”
—Salman Rushdie
“A beautiful, engrossing and fascinatingly structured novel. Lucid,
limpid, savage. Knowingly ahistorical. Romantically fictive.
Cunningly layered. Tyll quietly intrudes on our present crisis of
European identity. Have four centuries made us any wiser? This
novel is a masterly achievement, a work of imaginative grandeur and
complete artistic control.”
—Ian McEwan
“Kehlmann’s imagination runs deep and wild. It travels with the
currents of history, in its cycles of brutality and violence, it
reaches into our own solitude and silence, summoning us, it soars
far and high, and echoes with the power of myth.”
—Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive
“Tyll proves that Kehlmann is literature’s jack-of-all trades. He
manages to combine meticulous historical research and virtuoso
language mimicry with a frightening exploration of our current
sense of dystopia. An incredible educational experience and
improbably entertaining.”
—Michael Haneke, writer and director of “The White Ribbon”
“A rip-roaring yarn . . . It plunges a modern reader into an
astonishingly violent and dirty alternative reality . . . But Tyll
is a very funny novel, too, with a Monty Pythonesque fascination
for absurd hierarchies . . . It’s a testament to Kehlmann’s immense
talent that he has succeeded in writing a powerful and accessible
book about a historical period that is so complicated and poorly
understood. He never pushes the parallels between present and past,
but there are many ways in which this strife-torn Europe, fractured
by religion, intolerance and war, is a reflection of our own
times.”
—The Guardian
“Kehlmann’s books are page-turners, running the gamut from
picaresque and family chronicles to gothic horror. They are nothing
if not approachable and generous with their pleasures, even as they
bound from genre to genre, coalescing into an ultimately
impossible-to-categorize vision of contemporary literature, its
past, and its potential . . . . Almost certainly Kehlmann’s magnum
opus . . . Tyll is Kehlmann’s most ambitious work.”
—J.W. McCormack, Publishers Weekly
“Odd, darkly entertaining scenes . . . A richly inventive work of
literature with a colorful cast of characters.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A rollicking historical picaresque . . . 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.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Darkly brilliant . . . Merciless . . . Profoundly humane . .
. But even as he reflects back the humanity of all who encounter
him, Tyll stands apart.”
—Boston Globe
“Injecting gleeful dark humor into a setting that manages to feel
both fantastically dystopian and historically grounded . . . [an]
irresistible story.”
—Booklist (starred review)
Praise for the German edition of Tyll
“The greatest living German writer.”
—Maxim Biller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
“A masterpiece. What an inexhaustible book and what a magnificent
subject.”
—Roman Bucheli, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
“Has the makings of a classic.”
—Judith von Sternburg, Frankfurter Rundschau
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