Tyll (novel)

Tyll is a 2017 novel, originally written in German, by the Austrian-German writer Daniel Kehlmann. The book is based, in part, on the folkloristic tales about Till Eulenspiegel, a jester that was the subject of a chapbook in 16th century Germany,[1] as well as on the history of the Thirty Years' War. The book was first published in October 2017 in the original German by Rowohlt Verlag.[2] An English translation by Ross Benjamin was published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House, New York, in February 2020.[3] Between its initial publication in 2017, and its publication in English, Tyll had sold almost 600,000 copies in Germany.[4]

Tyll
First edition (Rowohlt, 2017)
AuthorDaniel Kehlmann
TranslatorRoss Benjamin
CountryGermany
LanguageGerman
GenreHistorical
PublisherRowohlt Verlag
Publication date
October 2017
Published in English
6 February 2020
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages473
ISBN978-3-498-03567-9
OCLC1006404492
833/.914
LC ClassPT2671.E32 T95 2017

Plot

Kehlmann does not narrate Tyll's story in a linear fashion. The chapter "Shoes" that serves as the novel's prologue tells a tale from the middle of the jester's life.

"Shoes." The Thirty Years' War has already begun, but so far, it hasn't come to this town. Tyll Ulenspiegel arrives with Nele, an old woman, and the donkey. The inhabitants of the town seem to town. Tyll and Nele perform to great applause. The performance culminates in a high-wire act, through which Tyll initiates a prank that causes violent upheaval. This involves the shoes of the spectators, hence the title of the introductory chapter. Kehlmann's source is the fourth story in the Eulenspiegel chapbook.[5] The prologue focuses on a young girl among the villagers; her name is Martha. Tyll offers the twelve-year-old to come with him and Nele but she declines. After the pain that the fight, following Tyll and Nele's performance has caused, a collective amnesia sets in in the small town. A year later, the war comes to this town, as well, taking the life of every inhabitant.

"The Lord of the Air." This chapter presents the actual beginning of the narrative. Tyll attempts to teach himself tightrope walking. He is showing progress after a while. The reader encounters his father Claus Ulenspiegel, the miller of their town, who is not like the others: he is able to read, loves books, and desires to study the mysteries of the world. Claus is fond of his only son, but he realizes that he is not very strong. Tyll's life at the mill is austere and violent; frequently he has to suffer abuse from his father's menial laborers. The fourth part of the chapter describes how Nele joins Tyll as he departs the his home where he can no longer stay after his fathers trial for practicing witchcraft and communicating with the devil, and his eventual execution. On their journey, they encounter Gottfried, the minstrel, and he offers them to travel with him on his wagon, and join him during his performance. Eventually, Pirmin, a mean and abusive traveling artist, introduces himself, and asks them to join him instead, and offers them to teach all the important skills of his trade. Nele is against it, but Tyll says yes on the basis of Pirmin's abilities that are greater than Gottfried's.

"Zusmarshausen." The narrative perspective in this chapter is more complex than in others, because not only are the events related in free indirect discourse that favors the viewpoint of Martin von Wolkenstein, the "corpulent Duke," but an additional narrative level describes how the Duke writes about this journey from Vienna to the Andechs Abbey in his personal memoir almost 50 years later. And the narrator of this level often quotes von Wolkenstein a number of times in a first-person discourse. It has come to the Emperor's attention that the "famous jester" (i.e. Tyll) has found shelter in the heavily damaged Andechs Abbey. It is nearly the end of the war. A number of parties are already negotiating in Westphalia. The Emperor gives the task of finding Ulenspiegel and bringing him back to Vienna to the not quite 25 years old Martin von Wolkenstein. A week after receiving the assignment, von Wolkenstein sets out with the imperial secretary Karl von Doder who has seen one of Tyll's performances a while back, along with three Dragoons. They make a stop of four weeks at the Melk Abbey where the "corpulent Duke's" uncle is the abbott. As the group travels east, they come through ever less populated landscapes. During some of the nights, they hear the thunder of canons from afar. Soon, the villages they encounter are more and more abandoned. All the remaining inhabitants are old or have been too weak to flee. At one point, Martin von Wolkenstein and his companions have to run away from a group of mercenaries for the "enemy" that want to steal their horses.

"Kings in Winter." Like all of the chapters in Tyll, this one is also written in free indirect discourse. The first part gives us Elizabeth Stuart's perspective of her and her husband's ill fate as the King and Queen of Bohemia, her love for the theater. Following "Zusmarshausen," this chapter takes the reader back in time about sixteen years. Years earlier, before meeting Friedrich V., she had met Shakespeare in person. The narrative in the chapter begins during her and Friedrich's exile in The Hague in the Netherlands. All of the sudden, the previous winter, the jester (Tyll) and his female companion had appeared in front of their door and asked for employment.

Temporal Sequence of the Chapters

The prologue entitled "Shoes" likely takes places between "Kings in Winter" and "The Great Art of Light and Shadow," since it is clear that Nele is still traveling and performing with Tyll during this prologue. They agree to part ways in "The Great Art of Light and Shadow" for Nele to get married and settle down.

1. The Lord of the Air (first chapter)

2. Hunger (fourth chapter)

3. Kings in Winter (third chapter)

4. The Great Art of Light and Shadow (fifth chapter)

5. In the Shaft (sixth chapter)

6. Zusmarshausen (second chapter)

7. Westphalia (seventh chapter)

Characters
  • Tyll Ulenspiegel, the son of Claus Ulenspiegel, the village miller, and Agneta. As a child, he teaches himself tightrope walking. He has to flee the village of his birth after his father has been executed for practicing witchcraft, and his friend Nele follows him. Being a natural, but also learning from the minstrel Gottfried and the crooked traveling artist Pirmin, Tyll fashions himself into a legendary jester, known all over the German-speaking lands.
  • Martha, a twelve year old girl in the prologue. Tyll and Nele perform in her town, and Tyll plays the prank with the shoes from the "4th History"[6] of the chap book.
  • Agneta, Tyll's mother
  • Claus Ulenspiegel, Tyll's father. A miller.
  • Nele. The baker's daughter, and Tyll's artistic partner and travel companion.
  • Dr. Anasthasius Kirchner, a questionable German Jesuit polymath.
  • Oswald Tesimond, an English Jesuit, involved in the so-called Gunpowder plot in 1605. Traveling Germany together with Dr. Kirchner.
  • Pirmin, the traveling artist. As they are traveling and performing with the minstrel Gottfried, Tyll convinces Nele to follow Pirmin, because he believes that they are able to learn a lot from the artist. When Pirmin's abuse becomes unbearable to them, Nele poisons Pirmin with a dish of mushrooms.
  • Frederick V. of the Palatinate, King of Bohemia, "the Winter King."
  • Elizabeth Stuart, his wife. The daughter of King James VI. of England and Ireland. Also "the Winter Queen."
  • Adam Olearius, a German scholar, widely traveled during his lifetime. Court mathematician of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Accompanies Kirchner on a mission to track down the last dragon, in order to find a cure for the plague. Kirchner disappears quickly on the journey after an encounter with Tyll who recognizes him as one of the men responsible for the wrongful indictment and death of Tyll's father.
  • Martin von Wolkenstein, "the corpulent Duke." A fictional character, crafted by Kehlmann. The Duke is a writer, to which his name and his fictional lineage (being a descendant of Oswald von Wolkenstein) refers. In the last year of the war, the Emperor in Vienna tasks Martin with finding the famous jester in his hiding place at the monastery of Andechs and bringing him to safety at the Imperial court. Tyll ends up saving Martin von Wolkenstein's life during the Battle of Zusmarshausen.

Critical reception

The reception of the novel upon its publication in the German-speaking countries was largely positive. Roman Bucheli of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung called Kehlmann's novel a "masterpiece". The critic claims that the book is "more than a novel" because it has chosen "wit and reason," as well as "art and knowledge" as its allies.[7]

Equally enthusiastic was Christoph Bartmann of the Süddeutsche Zeitung Munich, who sees in Kehlmann's Tyll his best book since his bestselling novel Measuring the World, that appeared in 2005, twelve years earlier.[8]

The novel was published in the United States in a translation by Ross Benjamin, a translator know for translations of novels by Friedrich Hölderlin and Joseph Roth as well as the diaries by Franz Kafka.[9]

Simon Ings of The Times denotes Tyll as "a laugh-outloud-then-weep-into-your-beer comic novel about a war." He goes on to emphasize the parallels between Kehlmann's novel, which the writer bases on transferring Till Eulenspiegel's story into the era of the Thirty Years' War, and another novel actually written about that exact same era and published twenty years after the end of the war, Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1668).[10]

Reviewing Kehlmann's novel for the Washington Post, the novelist Jon Michaud comments on the structure of Tyll: "Each chapter functions as a self-contained short story or novella with recurring themes and characters tying the whole together. Some are more successful than others, and the best are transfixing."[11]

Television adaptation

The novel is currently being adapted into a television series for Netflix. The adaptation will be produced by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, the showrunners of Dark.[12]

Awards
  • 2018: Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis: "Sein Roman Tyll macht die legendäre Gauklerfigur des Eulenspiegel zum Zeitzeugen des Dreißigjährigen Krieges und schafft damit eine epische Studie über Religion, Aberglauben, Machtpolitik und Krieg sowie einen abgründig komischen Künstlerroman: ein sprachmächtiges, ernstes und leichtfüßiges Meisterwerk, das der Historie neue, bis in die Gegenwart weisende Erkenntnisse abliest."[13] (Engl. "[Kehlmann's] novel Tyll turns Eulenspiegel, the legendary jester figure, into a historical witness to the Thirty Years' War, and thereby creates an epic study on religion, superstition, power politics, and war, as well as into an inscrutably comical artist's novel: a linguistically powerful, profound, and lightly flowing masterpiece which gains new insights from history which reach as far as the present day.")
  • 2020: Longlist of the International Booker Prize for Ross Benjamin's English translation of Kehlmann's Tyll.[14]

References
  1. Bote, Hermann. "Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel". Zeno.org. Retrieved 7 December 2020.
  2. "Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann". Rowohlt (in German). Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  3. Kehlmann, Daniel. "Tyll: A Novel; translated by Ross Benjamin". Penguin Random House. Pantheon Books. Retrieved 29 January 2021.
  4. Grey, Tobias (11 February 2020). "Daniel Kehlmann Says Hello to a Cruel World". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 December 2020.
  5. Bote, Hermann. "Die 4. Historie sagt, wie Ulenspiegel den Jungen bei zweihundert Par Schuch ihn von den Füssen ret und macht, daz sich alt und jung darum bei den Har roufften". zeno.org. Retrieved 29 January 2021.
  6. Bote, Hermann. "Die 4. Historie sagt, wie Ulenspiegel ..." zeno.org. Retrieved 9 December 2020.
  7. Bucheli, Roman. "Daniel Kehlmanns neuer Roman: die Geburt Europas aus dem Geist des Krieges". Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Retrieved 7 December 2020.
  8. Bartmann, Christoph. "Ein Clown in düsterer Zeit". Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved 7 December 2020.
  9. Grey, Tobias (11 February 2020). "Daniel Kehlmann Says Hello to a Cruel World". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 December 2020.
  10. Ings, Simon (25 January 2020). "A folklore unto himself". The Times (United Kingdom).
  11. Michaud, Jon (20 February 2020). "Daniel Kehlmann's 'Tyll' — a future Netflix series — follows a German jester navigating war-torn chaos". Washington Post. Retrieved 9 December 2020.
  12. "Daniel Kehlmann in Auswahl für International-Booker-Preis". Der Spiegel (in German). 2 April 2020. Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  13. "Daniel Kehlmann mit Hölderlinpreis 2018 ausgezeichnet". Bad Homburg. Retrieved 7 December 2020.
  14. "2020 International Booker Prize Longlist Announced". The Booker Prizes. Retrieved 7 December 2020.
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