- Me and Kaminski Book Cover
Daniel Kehlmann. Me and Kaminski. Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.
Review by Simona Sivkoff
In 2003, Daniel Kehlmann made his ultimate breakthrough with the novel Me and Kaminski and established himself permanently on the German-speaking literary map. As a celebrity and best-selling writer both in Austria and Germany, Kehlmann knows firsthand about the obsessive nature of contemporary culture with success, fame, and genius. His novel Me and Kaminski is a parody of the myth of the creative genius and its cultural production. In the eyes of the young megalomaniac journalist Sebastian Zollner, the world of art is populated by genius artists. He thinks he has struck gold by coming across Manuel Kaminski, a painter and “the last pupil of Matisse.” Already quite advanced in years and living a withdrawn life in the safety of a remote Alpine village, Kaminski seems to represent a perfect opportunity for Zollner to make the transition from a small-time journalist into an art critic. “I'd be invited to go on TV,” he muses. “I would talk about him and at the bottom of the screen it would show my name as Kaminski’s biographer.”
Sebastian Zollner makes his pilgrimage to the retreat of the nearly blind Kaminski. On his way there, Zollner insults everyone he meets: a train escort, whose job description he mocks, a stationmaster, whose dialect he does not understand, and a restaurant proprietress, whom he calls a “simple” person who just lived “instead of thinking.” Chain smoking and constantly checking for a bald spot, Zollner compensates for his professional mediocrity and interpersonal insensitivity by adopting the role of a generous misanthrope. His tone is derisive and arrogant, his actions marked by despair and denial and driven by a maniacal need to be a part of the celebrity art world. In his quest for personal aggrandizement and fame, Zollner comes out more a deranged paparazzo than a respectable art critic. His investigative journalism boils down to rummaging through Kaminski’s private correspondence and taking photos of his unfinished paintings.
Entangled in a series of funny mishaps, instead of resulting in the cherished biography, Zollner’s encounter with Kaminski leads him to face himself. Unnoticeably, the focus is reversed; Daniel Kehlmann’s unsympathetic character becomes a complicit victim to an insatiable system obsessed with the cult of personalities. With skill and humor, Kehlmann depicts human ambition as a sickness that needs to be overcome and success in the contemporary art world as a result of coincidence, nepotism, and misrepresentation.
Daniel Kehlmann’s Me and Kaminski is a powerful satirical commentary on interpersonal relations, self, and public image, as well as the role of critics and artists in perpetuating a culture of stardom that overshadows art itself.
- Wolf Haas
TUESDAY OCTOBER 27, 6:00 PM
EUROPEAN BOOK CLUB | AUSTRIAN BOOK CLUB SESSION
The Austrian Cultural Forum's First Austrian Book Club Session
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago: A novel by Wolf Haas
After having taken part in the European Book Club’s events twice in the past, we were inspired to host our first Austrian Book Club evening at the Austrian Cultural Forum on October 27. Our subscribers and (EBC) friends expressed interest in discussing books by contemporary Austrian authors, so we would like to take this opportunity to introduce the recent translation of The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Austria's favorite crime novelist, Wolf Haas.
The author was a guest at a Meet the Author event at the Austrian Cultural Forum in fall 2008 where he read and talked about his detective novels. Also in November of last year, the Austrian Cultural Forum featured Christoph Dostal’s one-man show The Way Dogs Do as well as two movies, Come Sweet Death and Silentium, all three works based on Wolf Haas’s novels. Wolf Haas, born in 1960, was trained as a linguist, taught as a university lecturer, and wrote catchy ads for advertising companies before his talent for storytelling brought him overnight fame as a “first-class mystery writer of the German-speaking world” (FACTS) with the release of his Resurrection of the Dead in 1997. Haas has been awarded numerous literary prizes in Austria and Germany and the film versions of the novels just referred to were very successful. Wolf Haas now lives in Vienna.
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago is all about the telling, rather than the story. The story itself is fairly simple: for fifteen years, the now thirty-year-old Vittorio Kowalski has been recording weather statistics for the Austrian village of Farmach where his family used to spend their vacations, and where as a teenager he fell in love with local girl Anni. Without ever returning to the village, he has memorized the weather conditions on every single day, a feat that lands him on Wetten dass...?, a popular German quiz show where contestants show off their peculiar talents. His TV success leads to a reunion with Anni, and the circumstances dredge up ancient history and precipitate new events. Secrets from the past are uncovered, but in the meantime Anni is about to marry Kowalski's old rival.
It sounds like a typical love story, but it isn’t. But we won’t tell you what happens next. We hope to have piqued your curiosity and inspired you to come join our book discussion. The book can be ordered directly from Ariadne Press, a California publishing house devoted to Austrian Literature (http://www.ariadnebooks.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=9781572411661) or from amazon.com.
We look forward to welcoming you at the ACFNY on October 27 for a lively and exciting discussion with Martin Rauchbauer, ACF’s deputy director, who will moderate the event. Registration for the Austrian Book Club event is required. Please contact library@acfny.org
