In the eclectic mix of the fictional and the historical, many names that appear in the later sections of the novel will often send the reader off to look them up in history books and encyclopaedias, sometimes even increasing the confusion further as many of them are very convincing and realistic creations by the author. Tyll’s story is entwined with that of many other characters, some of them real historical personages such as Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England and the wife of the Elector of Bohemia, and scholars like Athanasius Kircher. We see Tyll as a juggler and a man of wit but short of some randomly portrayed acts of legerdemain or a couple of scenes where the protagonist’s presence of mind is noted or his fame is discussed in public (the Kaiser himself wants Tyll in his retinue), there is little to testify to his legendary reputation. One would agree with Anthony Cummins who notes in his review of the book that it is “an episodic hopscotch through the royal politicking behind the continent-wide bloodshed” where the story of the protagonist is often relegated to a secondary position. The later sections of the novel, however, struggle to hold the reader’s interest and after being totally absorbed in the tale of Tyll’s village, the reader is likely to feel lost in the many courtrooms, battlefields and the variety of landscapes that appear one after another. Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, Pantheon, Rs 2,075 In the figure of Eulenspiegel, the individual gets back at society the stupid yet cunning peasant demonstrates his superiority to the narrow, dishonest, condescending townsman, as well as to the clergy and nobility.” The jests and practical jokes, which generally depend on a pun, are broadly farcical, often brutal, sometimes obscene but they have a serious theme.

As the entry on Tyll in the Encyclopaedia Britannica explains: “The earliest extant text is Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dyl Vlenspiegel (Antwerp, 1515 ‘An Amusing Book About Till Eulenspiegel’) the sole surviving copy is in the British Library, London. For those who are not familiar with Tyll Eulenspiegel (his last name means ‘owl mirror’), he is a figure from German legend who is famous for his tricks, witty jests and practical jokes that border on the scatological even. Of course, Richard Strauss’s unforgettable tone poems probably introduced Tyll to classical music aficionados. Tyll, Daniel Kehlmann’s biographical novel on Tyll Eulenspiegel, the picaresque German trickster hero, is a rich retelling of the stories that have come down to us from medieval chapbooks and nineteenth-century reconstructions that connected the protagonist to the Reformation.

Tyll novel