Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes

by Carol Brown Janeway (Translator), Daniel Kehlmann (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2011

  $11.28

  Imagine being famous. Wouldn't that be great? But what if, one day, you got stuck in a country where no one spoke your language. Where no one knew your face and you had no way of contacting home. How would your fame help you then? What would happen if someone got hold of your mobile phone? If they spoke to your girlfriends, your agent, your director and started making decisions for you. And when no one believed that you were you any more, when you saw a lookalike acting your roles for you, what would you do? In this delightfully entertaining book, Daniel Kehlmann throws his characters into situations that are thrilling, funny, surprising and tragic, confirming his place as one of his generation's finest writers.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $3.42

  In the first of Fame's nine stories, the technician Ebling whose high point of the week is the Wiener Schnitzel on the office canteen menu, at last succumbs to the blandishments of the mobile phone and through an error is assigned the number of the actor Ralf Tanner. Soon he is taking Tanner's calls, making his decisions and talking to his girlfriends without any responsibility - with disastrous consequences. Other characters in Fame are the writers Leo Richter and the mortally ill Rosalie; we also see numerous staff of the mobile phone business, and even a thinly veiled version of a famous feelgood writer in his Rio Penthouse, with a gun in his mouth as he contemplates his valueless oeuvre, a title of which appears irritatingly in each chapter to console or infuriate. The main theme of the novel is switching identity amidst the effects of modern changing technology and the confusing game of deception played between reality and fiction. The characters fear obscurity, they dream of recognition and of being the inspiration for famous stories...