Tyll: A Novel

A strange one, this, but brilliant. I still haven't quite fathomed it out. The story of a jester, his childhood and fragments of his life duting the Thirty Years War, but told in fragmentary fashion, and often through the eyes of others, with Tyll only appearing briefly. An excellent novel, it sticks in the mind in all sorts of troubling ways.

Rating 3.7

Reason read; randomizer/WL pick for 2022. Recently added to 1001 books.
This is a historical novel with "magical" aspects. Kehlman introduces a mythological element of "trickster" into the story that is set during the Thirty Year War. I knew very little about trickster and even less about the 30 year war. In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story (god, goddess, spirit, human or anthropomorphisation) who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior. The Thirty Year war occurred in 1618 to 1648. The origins rest in religion (protestant vs Roman Catholic) but also in politics, Hapsburg against the French. I found the story entertaining and probably a good way to read about the 30 year war but I know only a bit more than I did going into the story. This was my first book by the German author Daniel Kehlmann.

I am in love. Kehlmann got this rare style to make historically important people feel human which is more than lovely. Also nice to learn a bit about the horrorful time of the Thirty Years' War.

When I first started this book, it seemed somewhat haphazard and disjointed. What kept me going is the quality of the writing. About half way through, I realized how the stories were connected to each other. The story telling reminds me of the Baroque Cycle novels by Neal Stevenson. As with those books, the story lines flow and meander only to converge effortlessly.

Loved the setting and the writing in this unusual book. This is the story of Tyll, a young man in the 17th Century whose father although a miller experiments with spells and curses. Tyll is bright, brave and talented. He teaches himself to walk on the tightrope and other acrobatic tricks. When his father is hung for blasphemy, Tyll and the neighbor girl, Nele take off with a "wandering entertainer" who treats them badly but teaches them many things about entertainment.

Through his adventures,Tyll comes in contact with Frederick and this wife, Elizabeth who are the deposed king and queen of Bohemia known as the Winter King. Tyll works as a jester or fool - one who can tell the King what others can't. Another character of interest is a fake scholar who claims many things including how to obtain dragon's blood.

The writing in this book is funny, beautiful at times, and at times feels like a fairy tale.

Without some knowledge of King Frederick and Queen Elizabeth (daughter of James I), I would have been more confused [ Read "The Daughters of the Winter Queen" in July 2020 which provided the background in understanding Elizabeth's plea to return to Bohemia even after it didn't exist.

Unusual book - not for everyone's taste, but delightful.

A dark, dark fable. I just don't like fables, so don't go by me!

The tale of the itinerant prankster Tyll Eulenspiegel (spelled in a million different ways...) has a similar sort of standing in German folklore to that of Robin Hood in England - written versions of the story go back at least to the earliest printed chapbooks, and places all over Germany claim associations with him, but no-one has ever found any convincing evidence that he really existed. The story is usually set in the first half of the 14th century, but Kehlmann has chosen to update it to the Thirty Years War (1618-48), a high-risk strategy because it means he's setting himself up to be compared to some of the most distinguished works in the German canon. Everyone who's anybody, from Grimmelshausen to Brecht, has used this particular conflict to illustrate the random, all-embracing horror of war, so it would be a challenge for any writer to try to find something new and worthwhile to say about it...

Kehlmann, of course, is extremely good at what he does, and he's produced a fluent, engaging and intelligent historical novel, a real page-turner that I raced through in a couple of days (and it's not a short book!). He brings Tyll together with real historical figures of the period, in particular Elizabeth Stuart, the "Winter Queen" (you've got to have something for the English readers...) and Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, the last of the great pre-Cartesian polymaths, the man who amongst many, many other things "solved" Egyptian hieroglyphs incorrectly, just missed discovering the cause of the plague, and almost invented the magic lantern. Gustavus Adolphus gets a memorable walk-on appearance. Never named, but a powerful presence just offstage, is Shakespeare, and we also get quite a few references to the Gunpowder Plot, so there's plenty to keep you amused even if your memories of Lützen, Wallenstein and the Peace of Westphalia are a bit vague.

What this book seems to be about is theatrical performance and the way it briefly gives the performer power - for good or ill - over the audience. Tyll, in Kehlmann's version, is a victim of his times who finds that performing and getting people to do things they didn't want to is the only way that he can assert his human identity and stay alive, despite all the logic that says he should have been squashed long ago by the forces of cruelty, war and intolerance. Elizabeth is addicted to performance, seemingly never understanding that she isn't merely an actor on a stage, and that her disastrous (Shakespeare-inspired) ambition to enter politics and play the role of a queen has plunged Europe into three decades of total war. And Kircher is also a performer, a laughable nonentity who has trapped himself into playing the role of a great scientist and does it so convincingly that everyone believes him, even when he comes out with leaps of logic that only Terry Pratchett could get away with. (Dragons are known to be invisible. Holstein is the one place in Germany where no-one has ever reported seeing a dragon, therefore there must be a dragon in Holstein...)

Fun and quite rewarding, but perhaps promises a bit more than it actually delivers.