- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Vintage (Oct 6 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0307389898
- ISBN-13: 978-0307389893
- Product Dimensions: 13 x 1.3 x 20.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 240 g
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“Display[s] a pyrotechnic ability to skewer not just journalists, but also the entire art world, from artists and critics to gallery owners and patrons. . . . Wonderful.” –The Washington Times
“A piercing look into the art world. . . . Kehlmann’s critique of celebrity, of fame and of the ugliness of self-promotion holds strong.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Zollner [is], in spite of everything, an endearing character who is both comic and sympathetic. . . . Can be absorbed and thoroughly enjoyed in one sitting.” –Rocky Mountain News
“Funny and surprisingly thoughtful. . . . Zollner touches on art and aging, truth and illusion–and the stories we tell ourselves so we can keep going when the going’s hard.” –St. Petersburg Times
“[Zollner] is . . . amusingly distasteful, utterly unreliable, [and] recognizable to readers of Nabokov and his present-day disciples like Amis and Banville. . . . Philosophically and psychologically provocative.” –Bookforum
“Sebastian Zollner and Manuel Kaminski are quite a pair. . . . Laugh-out-loud funny.” –Las Vegas Review-Journal
“A singular book, barbed and compassionate, uproarious and touching.” –The Anniston Star
“Witty, shrewd and smartly translated.” –The Guardian (London)
“A bitingly funny meditation on memory, aging and death.” –The Free Lance-Star
“[Me and Kaminski] will leave you breathless, caught between laughter and tears, pondering the Great Questions such as ‘What is Art?’” –The Putnam County Courier
“Kehlmann has a sure eye for the pretensions of artists and critics. . . . [A] sparkling and consistently amusing comedy, by turns broad and sophisticated.” –The Telegraph (London)
“Fun, fast, and thoroughly enjoyable.” –New Statesman
“[A] novel with brain and a heart–[Kehlmann’s] real masterpiece.” –Granta
“By turns rollicking, witty and touching. . . . A real treat.” –The Howard County Times
“A gleeful massacre of media presumptions and art-world pretensions.” –The Independent (London)
“Zollner’s probing of Kaminski’s life culminates in whimsical and often laugh-out-loud circumstances. . . . A satire of all sorts of people in creative professions.” –Sacramento Book Review
“A piercing look into the art world. . . . Kehlmann’s critique of celebrity, of fame and of the ugliness of self-promotion holds strong.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Zollner [is], in spite of everything, an endearing character who is both comic and sympathetic. . . . Can be absorbed and thoroughly enjoyed in one sitting.” –Rocky Mountain News
“Funny and surprisingly thoughtful. . . . Zollner touches on art and aging, truth and illusion–and the stories we tell ourselves so we can keep going when the going’s hard.” –St. Petersburg Times
“[Zollner] is . . . amusingly distasteful, utterly unreliable, [and] recognizable to readers of Nabokov and his present-day disciples like Amis and Banville. . . . Philosophically and psychologically provocative.” –Bookforum
“Sebastian Zollner and Manuel Kaminski are quite a pair. . . . Laugh-out-loud funny.” –Las Vegas Review-Journal
“A singular book, barbed and compassionate, uproarious and touching.” –The Anniston Star
“Witty, shrewd and smartly translated.” –The Guardian (London)
“A bitingly funny meditation on memory, aging and death.” –The Free Lance-Star
“[Me and Kaminski] will leave you breathless, caught between laughter and tears, pondering the Great Questions such as ‘What is Art?’” –The Putnam County Courier
“Kehlmann has a sure eye for the pretensions of artists and critics. . . . [A] sparkling and consistently amusing comedy, by turns broad and sophisticated.” –The Telegraph (London)
“Fun, fast, and thoroughly enjoyable.” –New Statesman
“[A] novel with brain and a heart–[Kehlmann’s] real masterpiece.” –Granta
“By turns rollicking, witty and touching. . . . A real treat.” –The Howard County Times
“A gleeful massacre of media presumptions and art-world pretensions.” –The Independent (London)
“Zollner’s probing of Kaminski’s life culminates in whimsical and often laugh-out-loud circumstances. . . . A satire of all sorts of people in creative professions.” –Sacramento Book Review
Book Description
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.
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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Amazon.com:
3.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Me and Kaminski, April 26 2012
By Stephen Balbach - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Me and Kaminski (Paperback)
`Me and Kaminski` (2003) is a sophisticated satire by Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. It's about a young biographer, Sebastian, who interviews a "famous" but old and near-death painter, Kaminski, so that Sebastian can publish an authoritative biography and - he hopes - become famous and wealthy. We quickly discover Sebastian is a hollow narcissist who cares only for himself ("Me" is first in the title) and gradually come to realize that Kaminski is even worse! Both use charm and guile to get their ways so the two together make for comedy. The trickster, Sebastian, becomes the tricked, by Kaminski, who gets Sebastian to drive him around, pay for things etc. The humor here is that among writers, biographers have a reputation as ambulance chasers and grave diggers, it's what hack writers do who can't do anything else, so we laugh at the comeuppance and turning of tables. Yet is Kaminski also a hack painter? His "fame" rests mainly on a few letters of recommendation and not his paintings which never sold well. Even the people in his village aren't sure who he is. It raises questions of authenticity, what is really important in life, the pretensions of the art world, image versus substance.Overall I enjoyed the novel but it's probably not for everyone, it will take some thinking and appreciation. It's carefully written, not much is by accident, for example the hitchhiker, Karl Ludwig, infers that a painting is the work of the devil, and likewise it's hard to escape the Faustian nature of the story, is Kaminski really the devil who had made a bargain with Sebastian? There is more of this type of symbolism for those who wish to find depth beyond the surface story, it rewards contemplation which is the mark of good piece of art. Of course, that is the same thing the novel is about: like Kaminski's painting of mirrors facing mirrors, the novel is evaluating art while we the reader are evaluating the novel as art! In this 110 page book the word "mirror" is used 31 times, it's a reflection of a reflection. The American/UK book covers don't "reflect" it but the original German cover shows a mirror on the cover, it's unfortunate the American/UK publishers missed this central theme.
1 of 3 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
By R. A. Frauenglas "Brooklyn Bum" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Me and Kaminski (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?
13 of 28 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Through A Glass Darkly", Mar 15 2009
By Stanley H. Nemeth - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Me and Kaminski: A Novel (Hardcover)
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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