Author(s): Daniel Kehlmann

Contemporary Fiction

In the first of Fame's nine stories, the technician Ebling whose high point of the week is the Wiener Schnitzel on the office canteen menu, at last succumbs to the blandishments of the mobile phone and through an error is assigned the number of the actor Ralf Tanner. Soon he is taking Tanner's calls, making his decisions and talking to his girlfriends without any responsibility - with disastrous consequences. Other characters in Fame are the writers Leo Richter and the mortally ill Rosalie; we also see numerous staff of the mobile phone business, and even a thinly veiled version of a famous feelgood writer in his Rio Penthouse, with a gun in his mouth as he contemplates his valueless oeuvre, a title of which appears irritatingly in each chapter to console or infuriate. The main theme of the novel is switching identity amidst the effects of modern changing technology and the confusing game of deception played between reality and fiction. The characters fear obscurity, they dream of recognition and of being the inspiration for famous stories...