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A visionary tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich.
An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.
When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.
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Tyll - A Novel (Paperback)
Daniel Kehlmann; Translated by Ross Benjamin
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R389
R364
Discovery Miles 3 640
Save R25 (6%)
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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'A masterly achievement, a work of imaginative grandeur and
complete artistic control' Ian McEwan 'Brilliant and unputdownable'
Salman Rushdie He's a trickster, a player, a jester. His
handshake's like a pact with the devil, his smile like a crack in
the clouds; he's watching you now and he's gone when you turn. Tyll
Ulenspiegel is here! In a village like every other village in
Germany, a scrawny boy balances on a rope between two trees. He's
practising. He practises by the mill, by the blacksmiths; he
practises in the forest at night, where the Cold Woman whispers and
goblins roam. When he comes out, he will never be the same. Tyll
will escape the ordinary villages. In the mines he will defy death.
On the battlefield he will run faster than cannonballs. In the
courts he will trick the heads of state. As a travelling
entertainer, his journey will take him across the land and into the
heart of a never-ending war. A prince's doomed acceptance of the
Bohemian throne has European armies lurching brutally for dominion
and now the Winter King casts a sunless pall. Between the quests of
fat counts, witch-hunters and scheming queens, Tyll dances his
mocking fugue; exposing the folly of kings and the wisdom of fools.
With macabre humour and moving humanity, Daniel Kehlmann lifts this
legend from medieval German folklore and enters him on the stage of
the Thirty Years' War. When citizens become the playthings of
politics and puppetry, Tyll, in his demonic grace and his thirst
for freedom, is the very spirit of rebellion - a cork in water, a
laugh in the dark, a hero for all time.
A thrilling exploration of psychological disturbance and fear from
the bestselling and prize-winning author of Measuring the World.
*Now a major film starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried* On
retreat in the wintry Alps with his family, a writer is optimistic
about completing the sequel to his breakthrough film. Nothing to
disturb him except the wind whispering around their glassy house.
The perfect place to focus. Intruding on that peace of mind, the
demands of his four-year-old daughter splinter open long-simmering
arguments with his wife. I love her, he writes in the notebook
intended for his script. Why do we fight all the time? Guilt and
expectation strain at his concentration, and strain, too, at the
walls of the house. They warp under his watch; at night, looking
through the window, he sees impossible reflections on the snow
outside. Then the words start to appear in his notebook; the words
he didn't write. Familiar and forbidding by turns, this is an
electrifying experiment in form by one of Europe's boldest writers.
The ordinary struggles of a marriage transform, in Kehlmann's
hands, into a twisted fable that stays darkly in the mind.
Measuring the World recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of
two geniuses of the German Enlightenment - the naturalist and
explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and physicist
Carl Friedrich Gauss. Towards the end of the 18th century, these
two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world. Humboldt,
a Prussian aristocrat schooled for greatness, negotiates savannah
and jungle, climbs the highest mountain then known to man, counts
head lice on the heads of the natives, and explores every hole in
the ground. Gauss, a man born in poverty who will be recognised as
the greatest mathematician since Newton, does not even need to
leave his home in Goettingen to know that space is curved. He can
run prime numbers in his head, cannot imagine a life without women
and yet jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a
mathematical formula. Measuring the World is a novel of rare charm
and readability, distinguished by its sly humour and unforgettable
characterization. It brings the two eccentric geniuses to life,
their longings and their weaknesses, their balancing act between
loneliness and love, absurdity and greatness, failure and success.
Imagine being famous. Being recognized on the street, adored by
people who have never even met you, known the world over. Wouldn't
that be great?
But what if, one day, you got stuck in a country where celebrity
means nothing, where no one spoke your language and you didn't
speak theirs, where no one knew your face (no book jackets, no TV)
and you had no way of calling home? How would your fame help you
then?
What if someone got hold of your cell phone? What if they spoke to
your girlfriends, your agent, your director, and started making
decisions for you? And worse, what if no one believed you were you
anymore? When you saw a look-alike acting your roles for you, what
would you do?
And what if one day you realized your magnum opus, like everything
else you'd ever written, was a total waste of time, empty nonsense?
What would you do next? Would your audience of seven million people
keep you going? Or would you lose the capacity to keep on doing
it?
Fame and facelessness, truth and deception, spin their way through
all nine episodes of this captivating, wickedly funny, and
perpetually surprising novel as paths cross and plots thicken, as
characters become real people and real people morph into
characters. The result is a dazzling tour de force by one of
Europe's finest young writers.
"From the Hardcover edition."
German artist Neo Rauch, championed as "the painter of the
zeitgeist" by The New York Times's Roberta Smith, presents new
paintings in PROPAGANDA. Rauch is widely celebrated for his
captivating compositions that bring together figurative painting
and surrealism into an entirely new kind of visual encounter. They
often hint at broader narratives and histories-seemingly
reconnecting with artistic traditions of realism-but they remain
dreamlike and impossible to reduce to a single story. Though his
art is highly refined and executed with great technical skill,
Rauch himself stresses the intuitive, deeply personal nature of how
he works. As the artist notes, "My process is far less a reflection
than it is drawing from the sediments of my past, which occurs in
an almost trance-like state. "Eight large-scale canvases and seven
smaller, more intimately scaled works continue the artist's
exploration of figuration and the ambiguous nature of meaning in
visual art. In some of the larger works, the saturation of the
canvas with characters, objects, and, forms, all rendered at
different scales and in conflicting arrangements, creates a
collage-like quality-a figurative scrapbook of Rauch's personal
iconography. The publication features a short story by German
novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann, which was inspired by the
paintings in this book. The fantastical text moves between
present-day New York and an unknown time of enchanted forests,
knights, and witches, exploring the many layers found in Rauch's
canvases. Published on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition
at David Zwirner, Hong Kong in 2019, Neo Rauch: PROPAGANDA is
available in both English only and bilingual English/traditional
Chinese editions.
"Measuring the World "marks the debut of a glorious new talent on
the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann's
brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal
geniuses of the Enlightenment.
Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to
measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist
Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the
Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to
man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and
hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely
socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space
is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly
eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in
1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the
post-Napolean world.
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F - A Novel (Paperback)
Daniel Kehlmann; Translated by Carol Brown Janeway
1
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R261
R237
Discovery Miles 2 370
Save R24 (9%)
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Ships in 9 - 17 working days
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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' - John
Burnside Artful and subversive, F tells the story of the Friedland
family - fakers, all of them - and the day when the fate in which
they don't quite believe catches up with them. Having achieved
nothing in life, Arthur Friedland is tricked on stage by a
hypnotist and told to change everything. After he abandons his
three young sons, they grow up to be a faithless priest, a broke
financier and a forger. Each of them cultivates absence. One will
be lost to it. A novel about the game of fate and the fetters of
family, F never stops questioning, exploring and teasing at every
twist and turn of its Rubik's Cube-like narrative. **Shortlisted
for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015**
Benjamin Rubin is a cantankerous old writer, whisky aficionado and
pedant, still basking in the reflected glory of long-ago success.
Martin Wegner is a rising young literary star, heralded as 'the
voice of his generation'. When Martin is given the opportunity to
develop his new play under the mentorship of his idol, the writers
meet in a dilapidated art-nouveau villa somewhere in the German
countryside. Two massive egos are set on a collision course in this
perceptive and compelling comedy about art and artists and the
legacy of fame. Christopher Hampton's translation of The Mentor by
Daniel Kehlmann premiered at the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal
Bath, in April 2017.
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F (Paperback)
Daniel Kehlmann; Translated by Carol Janeway
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R456
Discovery Miles 4 560
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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Fame and facelessness, truth and deception, spin their way
through the nine interlocking chapters of this captivating and
wickedly funny novel by the internationally bestselling author of
"Measuring the World."
No one is more surprised than Ebling when his new cell phone begins
receiving calls meant for popular actor Ralf Tanner. At first he
tries to set the callers right, but soon he is enjoying the drama
and power that celebrity brings. Little does he know that his
actions will cause a ripple effect that will leave very few lives
untouched, from the movie star himself to those lingering at the
edges of the limelight. And as paths cross and plots thicken, the
boundaries of fiction and reality start to crumble.
Sebastian Zollner is searching for his big break. A failure as a
journalist, a boyfriend, and a human being, he sets out to write
the essential biography of the eccentric painter Manuel Kaminski.
All he needs to do is ingratiate himself into Kaminski's family,
wait for him to kick the bucket, and then reap the rewards. There's
only one problem. Kaminski has an agenda of his own, an agenda that
will send them on a wild-goose chase to places neither of them ever
expected to go.
Told with Nabokovian wit and an edgy intelligence, "Me and Kaminski
"is a shrewd send-up of art and journalistic pretensions from the
internationally acclaimed author of "Measuring the World."
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