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“With the wizardry of a puzzle master Daniel
Kehlmann permutes the narrative pieces of this Rubik’s Cube of a
story—involving a lost father and his three sons—into a solution that clicks
into position with a deep thrill of narrative and emotional satisfaction.
Kehlmann is one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today,
and he manages all this while exploring matters of deep philosophical and
intellectual import. He deserves to have more readers in the United States.”
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
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“What a strange and beautiful novel, hovering on the
misty borders of the abstract and the real. Three brilliant character studies
in the brothers—religion, money, and art—what else is there? The answer,
Kehlmann suggests, without ever saying so, is love, and its lack is the essence
of the failures of all three. But while these fates unroll in the idiom of
psychological realism, there is a cooler geometry working on the reader, a
painterly sense of the symmetry in human fates. It’s a deeply writerly novel with
a stout backbone of wonderful characterization. High achievement.”
— Ian McEwan, Man Booker Prize–winning author
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“As
with Thomas Pynchon’s V, or Tom
McCarthy’s C, in Daniel Kehlmann’s
subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel, readers and
characters alike exist for a time in that hazy uncertain land, where there is
not only the desire but the need to solve for x—or, in Kehlmann’s case, ‘F’…translated
deftly from the German by Carol Brown Janeway…ambitious…elegant.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“A comic tour de force, a biting satire on the hypnotized
world of artificial wants and needs that Huxley predicted, a moving study of
brotherhood and family failure, F is an astonishing book, a work of
deeply satisfying (and never merely clever) complexity that reveals yet another
side of a prolifically inventive writer who never does the same thing twice.
That one of its central motifs is the Rubik’s Cube is highly apt…Yet F
is also much more than an intricate puzzle: it is a novel of astonishing
beauty, psychological insight, and, finally, compassion, a book that, in a
world of fakes and manufactured objects of desire, is the real article, a
bona-fide, inimitable masterpiece.”
— Times Literary Supplement
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“Each son’s tale reads like a satisfying novella,
and the three eventually dovetail in a way that surprises without feeling
overdetermined…[Kehlmann] shows off many talents in F. He’s adept at aphorism, brainy humor, and dreamlike sequences.
And he keeps the pages lightly turning while musing deeply.”
— New York Times
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“Some writers, such as Munich-born Daniel Kehlmann,
pack just as powerful a punch with a small-scale event whose impact we know
will have slow-burning but far-reaching repercussions.”
— Minneapolis Star-Tribune
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“[A] rich, absorbing, and well-orchestrated
narrative.”
— Boston Globe
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“[A] lollapalooza of a family comedy, diabolically
intricate in its layering of concurrent narratives, and dryly hilarious at
every mazelike turn…F is splashed
with vivacious, hilarious characters and incidents that, with distance and
time, transmogrify into something quite sinister indeed.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
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“Steeped in magical realism, this novel
introduces Austrian-German author Daniel Kehlmann to an American audience.”
— Barnes & Noble, editorial review
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“A clever, moving tragicomedy that meditates on the
meaning of family, faith, fatherhood, and probably a bunch of other words that
begin with f.”
— Grantland
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“Both bizarre and bleakly humorous, a slim manifesto on the divide between people’s dreams and their destinies.”
— Publishers Weekly
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“An elusive novel whose events remain cryptic and largely unexplained…German writer Kehlmann takes us on a strange and enigmatic journey here.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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“F is an
intricate, beautiful novel in multiple disguises: a family saga, a fable, and a
high-speed farce. But then, what else would you expect? Daniel Kehlmann is one
of the great novelists for making giant themes seem light.”
— Adam Thirlwell, award-winning author of The Escape