Review of Tyll: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann

Who doesn't like the idea of a jester? Perhaps getting a bad rap for the modern conception of a playing card which can mess up the most well made game plans, the actual historicity of the figure is something more nuanced and diverse, from king's diversion to soothsayer. Most often a side character, Daniel Kehlmann, in his 2017 Tyll: A Novel, puts the jokester front and center in 16th century Germany. The playing card comes to life.

Skeptic and cynic that I am, what follows should have a caveat: I am a sucker for books which cleverly poke at the absurdities of the human condition. Yes, Robert Sheckley is amazing, and while Kehlmann's style is one altogether different than Sheckley's, the two both keep a distance from their characters such that their true humanity can be boiled down to its bones, many of which are irrational. Here are a few of those of Tyll:

Tyll tells the story of village miller's son who finds himself alone on the roads of Medieval Germany after a bout of religious fervor takes his family. Meeting up with a roadshow, he puts the talents he learned at the mill, for example walking on ropes, to good use, becoming one of the show's star attractions. Tyll goes on to become famous around the land, even as it erupts in war. Accompanied by a woman and talking donkey, it's Tyll's journey, however, not the destination, which provide the meat to his fable.

Tyll is delightfully non-linear. Backwards and forwards and switching to other characters, the novel's basic form of organization is the chapter. Kehlmann does an excellent job parsing out the content readers need to situate themselves in the setting and timeline, and can thus put their minds to why the chapters are organized as they are. While Kehlmann's poking at the absurdities of humanity are subtle and delicate throughout, the uber-structure of the novel means that the pokings become all the sharper and more effective as the pages turn, culminating in a couple of chapters that give the theme the tragic-comedy it needed to succeed. The joker walks among us playing his tricks while we observe, seemingly indifferently.

The setting historical, it's natural that the absurdities Kehlmann pokes at are nothing new for the experienced reader of satire. While 21st century settings would seem to have more potential for fresh material than Medieval German villages, the story remains a work of art. The humor sporadic but fine-tuned and the overarching narrative considerate of all things that can make writing delicious, the pages turn with ease as the plight of Tyll and his companions evolves across a war-torn land.

In the end, Tyll is one of those novels literary-minded readers will gobble up. The prose/translation delivers on a superb balance of setting, character, and story to indirectly deliver a theme dripping with German/Czech/Bohemian history. A potrayal of war undercut by a jester wholly representing the folly of being human, the story is by turns laugh inside then shake your head at the irrationality of our species. And perhaps above all it can be said that Kehlmann does the jester archetype classic justice. Neither pulling his punch or getting too deep, the reader gets the image from a playing card but with a bulwark of the futility of war and religion to back it up.