Read by Jim Meskimen, Bronson Pinchot, Robert Fass

From the young, internationally acclaimed author of Measuring the World comes a stunning tragicomic novel about three brothers, their relationship to their distant father, and their individual fates and struggles in the modern world One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something. Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes. In time, still absent from his family, he begins to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author. His sons grow into men who manifest their inexplicable loss-Martin becomes a priest who does not believe in God; Ivan, a painter in constant artistic crisis; Eric, a businessman given to hallucinations and a fear of ghosts-even as they struggle to understand their father's disappearance and make their own places in the world. Title Info. Dedication. The Great Lindeman The Lives of the Saints Family Duties Beauty Seasons "With the wizardry of a puzzle master Daniel Kehlmann permutes the narrative pieces of this Rubik's Cube of a story-involving a lost father and his three sons-into a solution that clicks into position with a deep thrill of narrative and emotional satisfaction. Kehlmann is one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today, and he manages all this while exploring matters of deep philosophical and intellectual import. He deserves to have more readers in the United States." "What a strange and beautiful novel, hovering on the misty borders of the abstract and the real. Three brilliant character studies in the brothers-religion, money, and art-what else is there? The answer, Kehlmann suggests, without ever saying so, is love, and its lack is the essence of the failures of all three. But while these fates unroll in the idiom of psychological realism, there is a cooler geometry working on the reader, a painterly sense of the symmetry in human fates. It's a deeply writerly novel with a stout backbone of wonderful characterization. High achievement." "As with Thomas Pynchon's V, or Tom McCarthy's C, in Daniel Kehlmann's subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel, readers and characters alike exist for a time in that hazy uncertain land, where there is not only the desire but the need to solve for x-or, in Kehlmann's case, 'F'…translated deftly from the German by Carol Brown Janeway…ambitious…elegant." "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 that reveals yet another side of a prolifically inventive writer who never does the same thing twice. That one of its central motifs is the Rubik's Cube is highly apt…Yet F is also much more than an intricate puzzle: it is a novel of astonishing beauty, psychological insight, and, finally, compassion, a book that, in a world of fakes and manufactured objects of desire, is the real article, a bona-fide, inimitable masterpiece." "Each son's tale reads like a satisfying novella, and the three eventually dovetail in a way that surprises without feeling overdetermined…[Kehlmann] shows off many talents in F. He's adept at aphorism, brainy humor, and dreamlike sequences. And he keeps the pages lightly turning while musing deeply." "Some writers, such as Munich-born Daniel Kehlmann, pack just as powerful a punch with a small-scale event whose impact we know will have slow-burning but far-reaching repercussions." "[A] rich, absorbing, and well-orchestrated narrative." "[A] lollapalooza of a family comedy

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