The point of F is not its humour (though Kehlmann, like Robbe-Grillet, can be very funny indeed), but its generosity. There are many such moments, they are all as beautifully judged as this one, and they are not the point. The white of the naked canvas shone through in several places, and even the ship was a mere assemblage of lines and dots. There were just some tiny bright patches of colour above the main deck. There were no more people any more, no more little flags, no anchor, no bent watch. The spirit of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movement’s greatest exponent, illuminates the scene in which Arthur takes his granddaughter to an art museum to study a picture by her missing uncle: “She stepped even closer, and immediately everything dissolved. His sons grow into men who manifest their inexplicable loss - Martin becomes a priest who does not believe in God Ivan, a painter in constant artistic crisis Eric, a businessman given to hallucinations and a fear of ghosts - even as they struggle to understand their father's disappearance and make their own places in the world.If Kehlmann played this intertextual game to the hilt – if F itself were as unforgiving as Arthur’s novel – then we would be looking at a less important book, as well as a less enjoyable one: some Johnny-come-lately contribution to the French nouvelle vague. In time, still absent from his family, he beings to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author. Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes.
Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something.
One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. From the young, internationally acclaimed author of Measuring the World comes a stunning, tragicomic novel about three brothers, their relationship to their distant father, and their individual fates and struggles in the modern world.
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