Ruhm

Fame – the title of he book – is all too familiar to Daniel Kehlmann, who gained world fame with his previous novel “Die Vermessung der Welt” (Measuring the World). He calls it a novel in nine stories but it is in fact more like Carver’s “Short Cuts”: independent stories which are loosely interconnected with each other.Besides the quality of each story I liked the way he connected the stories. There is a famous actor who all of a sudden does not get phone calls anymore, there is an engineer who gets his phone call and slips into another life. There is a woman with cancer, who wants to commit suicide but fights/talks with the author of her story. There is an “autistic” internet junkie, who fails to speak in public, there is a guy with two families, and a writer which is admired by the internet-junkie. The write just uses everything for his literature – even the life if his girlfriend, which works for an NGO and her colleagues got kidnapped and so on and on.
I liked how our modern life is portrayed – yes, here is an example of how computers, modern technology and its effects on us can be the background of great literature. It does nt have to be ab exotic place in remote time or the Second World War.