At the exact midpoint, to the page, of Daniel Kehlmann’s 2017 novel Tyll, there appears, for the first time, the figure of an empty canvas, which will come to govern the remainder of the work. The canvas is a gift bestowed by the eponymous fool-artist, Tyll Ulenspiegel—whom Kehlmann has transplanted from the 14th to the 17th century, from Germany’s medieval literary tradition to the baroque—upon his recently-acquired patron, the exiled Elizabeth Stuart of England, “Winter Queen” of Bohemia, wife of the “Winter King” Friedrich V of the Palatinate. Friedrich’s decision to proclaim himself King of Bohemia, a title he held for only a year (hence the derisive nickname “Winter King”), marked the beginning of the Thirty Years War that tore up much of Europe between 1618 and 1648; it is against this backdrop of historical chaos that Kehlmann narrates Tyll’s trajectory, in a series of isolated, chronologically disordered episodes. „Sarah Pourciau: THE EMPTY CANVAS: Daniel Kehlmann’s “Tyll” and the Origins of Modernity“ weiterlesen