“When Trump won, I was so shocked and worried that for a while I couldn’t write anymore,” Kehlmann says. Kehlmann, his wife, the human-rights lawyer Anne Rubesame, and their son, Oscar, live in Manhattan, after years shuttling between New York and Berlin. Kehlmann was about two-thirds of the way through when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. “Tyll” took him five years to write, twice as long as any of his other novels. The idea of a jester character appealed to Kehlmann, he says, “because he’s someone who could go anywhere and meet anybody at a time when there was not much social mobility.” But for a long time it was a novel that Kehlmann, who turned 45 in January, was reluctant to write. Kehlmann’s eighth novel and the sixth one to come out in English, “Tyll” is also his second book of historical fiction, following his 2005 best seller “ Measuring the World.” “Tyll” has either been or is being translated into more than 20 languages. Tyll travels through a Europe devastated by conflict, encountering fraudsters, soldiers and royalty, including Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, whose love of Shakespeare chimes with Tyll’s own sense of theatrical spectacle.
“Tyll” transmits the 14th-century tale of the jester Tyll Ulenspiegel about 300 years into the future, plopping him into the Thirty Years’ War. It has sold nearly 600,000 copies in Germany since it was published there in 2017, and is being adapted by Netflix as a television series.
For example: “Tyll,” his latest book, which Pantheon will publish in an English translation by Ross Benjamin on Feb. It was the kind of caper that he might have written into one of his novels, where escape artists, pranksters or con men often outwit their adversaries. BERLIN - When Daniel Kehlmann read the news that the former Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn, facing financial misconduct charges in Japan, fled the country in a box, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of admiration.
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