Daniel Kehlmann interview

"So much civilization and so much horror...What a combination!"
Daniel Kehlmann

HAARETZ.com publishes an interview with Daniel Kehlmann , the author of "Measuring the World", now regarded as a masterpiece.

"Because fiction is a way to 'correct' the official ways history is written. If you read Humboldt you often get the impression that he does not narrate things exactly the way they happened to him. He cannot have been as relaxed, detached and aloof as he wants us to believe. Therefore in my novel the Humboldt-character often decides to write down things differently from the way they happened - a technique by which I am trying to show what I tried to do as a novelist: giving both versions, mine and his. In some cases my version might even be closer to the truth ... Only a novelist can do that, a journalist or a historian cannot. Only by making a contract with the reader, stating that nothing he or she will read is supposed to be taken at face value, can a novelist give us a form of truth that only literary art can provide."