Tyll (4*)

Odd to read a second historical novel about pre-Enlightenment Europe, this one a kind of origin story for a German fairy tale character set against the very sobering backdrop of the Thirty Years War.  And like As Meat Loves Salt, Tyll left me counting my lucky stars that I was born in the mid-twentieth century.  Imagine a world dominated by superstition, brute force and zero opportunity for advancement unless you're a clever, talented boy who tightrope walks, juggles and snaps at royals.  Kehlmann brilliantly tells his story from multiple perspectives (Tyll himself, a deposed queen, a scholar, a court lackey and more, all perfectly drawn) on a fractured timeline that demands the reader's full attention.

It's hard to believe that a German could write something as amusing as this in the voice of the Scottish-born former Queen of Bohemia (who sent me to Wikipedia to explain the meaning of electoral palatinate, a critical and still somewhat mystifying plot point):

She had missed good theater more than anything else, from the beginning, even more than palatable food. In German lands, real theater was unknown; there, pitiful players roamed through the rain and screamed and hopped and farted and brawled.  This was probably due to the cumbersome language for theater, it was a brew of groans and harsh grunts, it was a language that sounded like someone struggling not to choke, like a cow having a coughing fit, like aa man with beer coming out of his nose.  What was a poet supposed to do with this language.  She had given German literature a try, first that Opitz and then someone else whose name she had forgotten; she could not commit to memory these people who were named Krautbacher or Engelkramer or Kargholzsteingrompl, and when you had grown up with Chaucer, and John Donn had dedicated verses to you--"fair phoenix bride," he had called her, "and from thine wye all lesser birds will take their jollity"--then even with the utmost politeness you could not bring yourself to find any merit in all this German bleating.

Kehlmann also delivers a moving, bravura ending in which this same FIERCE queen asserts her power in a way that has me panting to see Netflix's long-gestating adaptation.  With luck, the series will be more accessible than this very literary novel without sacrificing too much of its unique quality.