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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
this book is supposed to be wickedly funny . . . it wasn't, May 22, 2010
This review is from: Me and Kaminski (Vintage) (Paperback)
"Me and Kaminski", by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway (204 pgs., 2003, 2008). According to the dust jacket blurbs, this is supposed to be a "wickedly funny . . . firecracker of a novel." On the back cover, one German reviewer wrote that he hadn't "Laughed so hard reading a new German novel for a long time . . . " A book reviewer for THE WASHINGTON POST'S BOOK WORLD mentioned that Kehlmann wrote in a "lightly surreal style . . . with flashes of magical realism . . ." I don't know what book those people were reading. I didn't laugh. Not even once. I guess German humor is very deep. It is so deep I couldn't find it. Was this a decent novel? Yes. It strikes at the pretentiousness of false pride, focusing on pretensions in the art world & how truth is bent by scoop seeking journalists. In this book, conniving art journalists are being out-connived by the conniving artists they are seeking to scoop. Is that humorous? Perhaps. Yet, the writing is more deadly serious than sarcastically humorous. In the end, it's the reader who gets totally fooled by a great O'Henryesque finale. If allowed, this book would be receiving 2.5 stars instead of 3. But, half-stars are not allowed. Perhaps, in the hand of a deft director this would make a good comic movie?
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12 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Through A Glass Darkly", March 15, 2009
This is a brilliant satirical novel, the bare events of its plot further enriched by the presence of both a poetic and a philosophical subtext. Its protagonist is a snoopy, narcissistic journalist, Sebastian Zollner, eager to make his "important" career in the art world by writing the biography of a once famous painter, Manuel Kaminski, now a recluse whose chief works were a series of mirror-image paintings called "Reflections.". The title, adroitly putting "Me" before "Kaminski" as it does, is the perfectly chosen open sesame into the self-absorbed character of Sebastian. Especially winning is the later tying together of Kaminski's art and Zollner's life, for author Kehlmann has Sebastian in a key moment look into a mirror and see only a stranger. Seeking the truth about his subject's life pure and simple, Sebastian in frustration discovers the persons he interviews about Kaminski contradict one another, and he is led to realize in a way the wisdom in Wilde's quip about seeing into others, that "the truth is never pure and rarely simple." This novel bears a resemblance to Henry James' "Aspern Papers," a work featuring a similarly prying journalist who is brought at length to see, though from a less overtly philosophical perspective, his own emptiness. Zollner realizes after his fruitless quest for ownership of Kaminski's life an undeniable similarity to the experience of the follower of an Eastern sage mentioned earlier in the novel, the discovery that he finally has "nothing" and should even give that "nothing" up. "Me and Kaminski" is a novel that has been carefully "written;" nothing in its series of interviews and madcap adventures is by chance. As such, it is a tale whose events are radiant with meaning, and, consequently, one which merits rereading.
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3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't Waste Your Time Reading This Book, January 10, 2009
I only managed to get half way through this book, I simply couldn't stand reading any further. The lead character ("Me") is a vile and shallow journalist, which leads to a couple of mildly amusing incidents in the first few pages. But he really starts to wear one down after a very short while, and the humour gets very laboured very quickly. The other characters are equally unenlightening, and the whole book starts to drag. You get a hint that Kaminski might have some redeeming qualities, but he disappears early on, and we get a horrendously kludgy sequence of interviews between "me" and Kaminski's vile acquaintances. So you get a one dimensional portrait of several uninteresting characters going on for page-after-page. That's when I gave up. The language of the novel matches the characters -- boring and vapid. Maybe the translator is at fault, though she can be forgiven. It must have been boring translating the "adventures" of such a banal character. The author completed a doctorate on Kant and the sublime, so you might have expected "me" to react in some way to the sublime in art. But all you get is "me" treating art analysis like an exercise in the lowest form of hack journalism. Which I guess is showing you the opposite of the sublime. But you don't get any hint of what the sublime in art might really be about. Maybe that's covered in the second half of the novel, but the total lack of sublimity in the first half made this seem unlikely to me. So I bailed.
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