92 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
is to suppress any itching modernity and
become that world view in order to sal-
vage it for contemporary readers.
We see the novelist vanish in this way
as Kehlmann establishes, in his early
pages, the rich limits of the life that Tyll
will eventually escape. Here is the boy
Tyll, ceaselessly practicing how to walk
a tightrope. He falls, and falls again: “It
is not possible to walk on a rope. That
is clear. Human feet aren’t made for it.
Why attempt it at all?” Around him is
the village, the only world he knows.
Most of the nearby fields are owned by
Peter Steger: “Most of the animals too,
which is easy to tell, for they have his
brand on their necks.” Here is Jakob
Brantner’s cowshed, and Martin Holtz’s
bakery, and here is the miller, Claus Ulen-
spiegel, Tyll’s father, sitting at a table,
doing what pleases him best: speculat-
ing. What is time? Does Hell exist? What
are stars, and how many are there? “Re-
cently the boy had asked him how many
stars there actually are, and because only
a short while ago Claus had counted, he
was, not without pride, able to give him
an answer.” Tyll “has heard his father say
everything that can be said.”
Claus is an autodidact who has scav-
enged a large library; the book that most
fascinates him is the one he hasn’t read,
because he doesn’t know Latin. He’s the
village sage, a dispenser of healing balms
and spells, a Christian who trusts in the
protection of painted pentagrams. When
his wife collapses, he draws one on her
forehead and starts to speak: “Christ was
born in Bedlem, baptized in tho flem Jor-
dan. Also tho flem astode, also astond thi
blode. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus
Sancti....He knows only roughly what
this means, but the spell is ancient and
he knows none stronger to stanch bleed-
ing.” (Kehlmann’s shrewd translator, Ross
Benjamin, vigorously grasps the offered
challenges.)
Claus’s activities excite the attention
of two roving Jesuit inquisitors, Dr. Tes-
imond and Dr. Kircher, characters who
reappear in the novel like sinister side-
kicks out of Kafka (and who are mod-
elled on their historical counterparts,
Oswald Tesimond and Athanasius
Kircher). They trick Claus into further
speculation, then torture a confession
of heresy out of him, easy enough since
he is so humble. “It’s obvious that he
did something wrong in his stupid head,
or else he wouldn’t be here,” Claus
reflects, in prison. At his trial, he art-
lessly admits to helping the sick “ac-
cording to the old way”:
I always did my best ... I read the future
of those who wanted to know it in water and
bird flight. Peter Steger’s cousin, not Paul Ste-
ger, the other one, Karl, I told him not to climb
the beech tree, not even to find treasures, don’t
do it, I said, and the Steger cousin asked: A
treasure in my beech tree? And I said: Don’t do
it, Steger, and Karl said: If there’s a treasure
there, I’m going up, and then he fell and smashed
his head. And I can’t figure it out, even though
I think about it all the time, whether a proph-
ecy that would not have come true if I hadn’t
made it is actually a prophecy or something else.Claus knows what lies ahead, and goes
to his death obediently, along with a local
woman accused of witchcraft. The vil-
lage hangman bluntly assures him that
execution has improved: “In the past you
were all burned to death. That takes time,
it’s not pleasant. But hanging is nothing.
It happens quickly. You climb onto the
scaffold and before you know it, you’re
standing before the Creator.”
The day after his father’s trial, Tyll
skips out of the village, accompanied by
Nele, a young woman he has persuaded to
join him. Nele is odd, restless—she knows
it is her fate to marry the Steger son, but
she doesn’t care to—and, like Tyll, a good
dancer. The couple hitch a ride with a
talentless balladeer named Gottfried,
whom the reader finds performing a lam-
entable new song about a devilish millerwho can only be Claus. Tyll’s uncanny
lack of a conscience—an almost ghostly
absence of soul—can be gauged by his
speedy adaptability: far from mourning,
he improves Gottfried’s public perfor-
mance by dancing along to it. We can’t
help delighting in Tyll’s puckish amoral-
ity—the liberating alternative to both the
pious rectitude of the established order
and the pious superstitions of his father.
The book’s narrative is daringly dis-
continuous. Tyll and Nele now vanish,
only to reappear in a new section thatjumps ahead to the end of the Thirty
Years’ War. Somehow, in the ensuing de-
cades, Tyll has established himself as the
Holy Roman Empire’s most celebrated
jester, and the Kaiser wants him for his
own household. From Vienna, the im-
perial capital, the Kaiser sends an envoy,
Martin von Wolkenstein, to find Tyll and
bring him back. Wolkenstein takes three
sturdy soldiers with him, and eventually
finds Tyll, who is poorly disguised as a
monk—and who happily joins Wolken-
stein’s posse as it makes its adventurous
way back to Vienna, a journey that takes
in the last battle of the Thirty Years’ War.D
espite the grimness of the sur-
roundings and the lancing inter-
ventions of history, the novel’s tone re-
mains light, sprightly, enterprising.
Kehlmann has an unusual combination
of talents and ambitions—he is a play-
ful realist, a rationalist drawn to magi-
cal games and tricky performances, a
modern who likes to look backward. He
made his name with his first novel to
be translated into English, “Measuring
the World” (2006), a vital and absurdly
readable account of the intersecting lives
of the explorer Alexander von Hum-
boldt (1769-1859) and the mathemati-
cian Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855).
But “Measuring the World” was a more
conventional novel than “Tyll.” Because
so much is known about the lives of
these two celebrated figures, the book
relaxed into easy biographical embroi-
dery (“Alexander von Humboldt was
famous in all of Europe for an expedi-
tion to the tropics he had led twenty-five
years earlier. He had been to New Spain,
New Granada, New Barcelona, New
Andalusia, and the United States,” and
so on.) The episodic adventurousness
of “Measuring the World” was some-
times purchased, one felt, at the cost of
intensity and depth of inquiry.
“Tyll” is vivified by the remoteness of
its setting and the mythical obscurity of
its protagonist, which oblige Kehlmann
to commit his formidable imaginative
resources to wholesale invention, and to
surrender himself to the curious world
he both inhabits and makes. At once
magister and magician, he practices the
kind of novelistic modesty that can be
found at the heart of classic storytelling.
The writer animates a perspectival fic-
tional universe that flutters with many