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Me and Kaminski

Me and Kaminski

by Daniel Kehlmann (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2008

    $8.72
Synopsis

Sebastian Zollner, an underachieving art critic, has pinned his hopes of advancement on writing the biography of the artist Manuel Kaminski, a forgotten former pupil of Matisse, now an ailing recluse. Inept, charmless, and with scant knowledge of art history, Zollner is hardly the man to rediscover a lost genius of 20th-century painting. But he has made one crucial discovery about his subject: that Kaminski's long-lost love, Therese, is still living, contrary to what the artist himself has been led to believe. On his arrival at Kaminski's isolated Alpine home, Zollner imposes himself crudely on the household, alienating the artist's protective daughter, Miriam. His efforts to unlock the secrets of Kaminski's life lead him to embark on a series of increasingly desperate measures. Having bribed the housekeeper to absent herself, he ransacks the house in search of revealing documents (he finds little of interest), then dismisses the frail Kaminski's doctor, and spirits the old man away in his daughter's Mercedes for a grand reunion with his old flame. From here on events spiral rapidly out of control. Zollner's and Kaminski's road-trip, by turns chaotic and grotesque, ends not with an emotional coming together of lost lovers, but in a comically bathetic encounter. Pursued by Kaminski's irate daughter, Zollner and Kaminski take to the road one last time, as the novel draws to its unexpectedly redemptive conclusion. In the paranoid and unlovable Zollner, the enigmatic and sympathetic Kaminski, and their satellite cast of art-world poseurs, eccentrics and oddballs, Kehlmann shows the same gifts for deft characterization and dialogue that he revealed so triumphantly in Measuring the World. Half road novel, half satire on the contemporary art scene, Kaminski and Me is a wryly humorous meditation on art, memory, and identity. It provides further compelling evidence of the exceptional talents of one of Europe's most exciting and gifted young novelists.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 224
 Publisher: Quercus Publishing Plc
Published: 02 Oct 2008
ISBN 10: 1847245803
ISBN 13: 9781847245809

Media Reviews
Kehlmann is a literary wunderkind - The Guardian on Measuring the World An accessible and humorous road trip into the worlds of art and journalism, satirizing both fast, fun and thoroughly enjoyable - The New Statesman. colourful brisk, cheerful tone gently humorous - The Literary Review. Kehlmann's novel satirises the biographer's egomania with viciousness and accuracy Kafka excelled at pitting his prose in the uncomfortable space between comedy and despair, and, in its best moments, the blinkeredness of Kehlmann's protagonists achieves a similar effect Me and Kaminksi is a philosophical book, though less obviously a novel of ideas than Measuring the World, a self-disguising work of genius, rather than a self-proclaimed one - Observer. Daniel Kehlmann's novel might seem playful on the surface but it also asks deep questions and, satisfyingly, refuses to answer them . Rich in irony and unpredictability offers us the unfakeable pleasure of sneaking an oblique glance at something real . Kehlmann develops the story with clever, controlled indirection There is a powerful, hallucinatory flashback to an episode in a salt mine We are involved as readers because we want to undermine who is leading whom and we can't - Sunday Times.
Author Bio
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and published his first novel at the age of 22. His fifth novel, Measuring the World, a huge European bestseller, received ecstatic reviews on its first UK publication in 2007.