THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 91
Amid rival orthodoxies, Tyll is as reckless as the Devil and as selfless as Christ.
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In “Tyll,” Daniel Kehlmann brings a mythical European trickster to life.BY JAMES WOOD
ILLUSTRATION BY HENNING WAGENBRETH
A
list of history’s mythic tricksters,
Lewis Hyde says in his book “Trick-
ster Makes This World” (1998), would
be endless. Since the trickster is culture’s
ultimate shape-shifting, boundary-cross-
ing figure, “there will be some sort of
representative wherever humans invent
boundaries, which is to say, everywhere.”
Hyde refers in passing to one of Europe’s
most notorious tricksters, Till Eulen-
spiegel, who enters folk literature in the
early sixteenth century but is supposed
to have flourished earlier, in the four-
teenth, crossing back and forth like a pi-
caresque hero across his native Germany,
the Netherlands, and Bohemia. Till was
likely as ambiguous as the culture re-
quired: a dangerous vagrant, a folk hero,
a journeyman magician, a bawdy circus
performer, a jester and prankster who,
like the Shakespearean Fool, recklessly
needled those in power into looking hon-
estly at themselves.
Like most great comic figures, the
trickster embodies a kind of secular eter-
nity—being unruly life itself, he is as un-
killable as the Devil. Just as he is about
to be captured and defeated, he slips away,
to furnish another tale. Our less playful era
tends to simplify such survivalism, award-
ing superhuman status to triumphant
comic-book heroes or to grimly effectiveaction figures, who survive so that they
can reappear in lucrative sequels—Jason
Bourne swimming away in the East River
toward the next installment. “Tyll” (Pan-
theon), a new novel by the German writer
Daniel Kehlmann, turns back to the ear-
lier ambiguity, reanimating the old Ger-
man chronicle of mobile mischief by plac-
ing its protagonist, Tyll Ulenspiegel, in a
deeply imagined early-seventeenth-cen-
tury world, a Europe ruined by the Thirty
Years’ War (1618-48).
I dimly recall studying that cata-
strophic event, best known perhaps for
the brief appearance of “the Winter King”
and for the Peace of Westphalia, which
brought it to an end. Yet the conflict was
one of comprehensive brutality and mis-
ery: millions were killed or displaced by
battle, looting, and plague. At narrative
ground level, the war is useful to Kehl-
mann as a plot prodder. Tyll is caught
up in battles and royal intrigues; he
switches from one side to another, hides
out in a destroyed abbey, is apprehended
by the Kaiser’s men, joins the court-in-
exile of “the Winter Queen” as a licensed
Fool, and so on. We are offered vivid
descriptions of villages burned to the
ground, forests cut down, stinking en-
campments, the hungry and the sick
wandering without help. This comes with
the historical territory. Kehlmann, a confi-
dent magician himself, plays his bright
pages like cards. But he has a deeper pur-
pose, which is revealed only gradually, as
the grand climacteric of his chosen war
steadily justifies its presence in the novel.
A remote historical period, rollicking
picaresque episodes, tricksters and magic,
ancient foggy chronicles—all the dan-
gers of the historical novel are here. The
reader fears the modern writer’s alien-
ation from these distant events, the threat
of steaming information dumps, comedy
at once broad and shallow, untethered
realism ballooning into pure fantasy. It’s
a pleasure to report that “Tyll” indulges
in none of that (or as little as is generi-
cally possible). Kehlmann is a gifted and
sensitive storyteller, who understands that
stories originate within communities, and
that such stories are convincingly dra-
matized when the novelist selflessly in-
habits his characters’ perspectives. His-
torical fiction makes the challenge of this
authorial disappearance more acute, but
also simpler: when a world view is re-
mote, the appropriate novelistic response