Me and Kaminski

Publishers Weekly

German literary wunderkind Kehlmann follows up Measuring the World(2006) with this curious and lesser novel. Self-conscious and yet completely un-self-aware, journalist Sebastian Zollner attempts to outdo his art critic rival by writing the biography of reclusive painter Manuel Kaminski. Sebastian is amusingly sad, if one-note: he lives in denial that his live-in girlfriend broke up with him months ago; after an offhand comment by a transit worker, he becomes obsessed with his receding hairline; and he detests in others everything he so blithely ignores about himself. He weasels himself into Kaminski's household, snoops through the artist's private files, discovers a series of unfinished paintings and attempts to up the drama by reuniting Kaminski with his ex-wife, long thought dead. It quickly becomes clear, however, that Kaminski is manipulating pathetic Sebastian, and Sebastian's plans are thwarted in favor of the master's own. There are entertaining and lightly satirical moments, but for the most part the story feels rushed, with everyone except Sebastian getting short shrift. (Nov.)

Library Journal

In his second novel to be translated into English (after Measuring the World), German-Austrian author Kehlmann tells the story of two lost souls. Sebastian Zollner is a 31-year-old art critic looking for his big break, and writing a biography of enigmatic painter Manuel Kaminski seems exactly the project to bring him the success he is convinced he deserves. As Zollner journeys into the French Alps to interview the doddering and nearly blind Kaminski, his personal life is falling apart, but he is aflame with a discovery that should lead to a pivotal scene in his book. Kehlmann's narrative is not particularly well paced, but its biggest weakness is that Zollner is a completely unsympathetic character. Even his bumbling is not endearing, paired as it is with his extreme impatience and overinflated sense of his own self-worth. But he meets his match in Kaminski, whose presence is a balance that allows the reader to appreciate the novel as a meditation on art and identity. Appropriate for large fiction collections; purchase if Measuring the World was well received.
—Karen Walton Morse

Kirkus Reviews

The second English translation from the young German author (Measuring the World, 2006).

Sebastian Zollner is a journalist, a vocation for which he is spectacularly unsuited. His strongest—really, only—character trait is self-absorption, which makes him a thoroughly unperceptive observer. He might be the world's most boorish art critic, and his most recent endeavor—the biography of a reclusive artist who will, with any luck, soon be dead—is compelling not so much because he's interested in the man's work, but because Zollner is pretty sure that he can get "a first-serial deal in one of the major color magazines." But it turns out that Zollner is no match for Manuel Kaminski. A contemporary of Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, Kaminski never quite achieved the acclaim of those modern luminaries, but he did achieve a certain kind of fame as a painter who worked while going blind. But before Zollner can discover whether Kaminski is a genius, a fraud, or both, the old man convinces his biographer to take him on a quest to find a lover whom he had thought was lost forever. While it is a less delightful story than Measuring the World, this novel is also a sort of European intellectual version of the buddy picture. Once again, Kehlmann explores a relationship between two men shaped by extraordinary circumstances—in this case, those circumstances include an untrustworthy hitchhiker and a rather pleasant prostitute. But the use of Zollner's first-person voice doesn't quite work. As an unreliable narrator, he is kind of hilarious, but the humanity he achieves by the end of his relationship with Kaminski will make the careful reader wonder about his cartoonish lack of empathy at the beginningof the novel.

Smartly entertaining, if not entirely convincing, lampoon of contemporary fame and the celebrity biography.