Good historical novels create a universe, and not simply dress some characters up in period costumes. This book is one of these.

I really liked the non-linear plot, the unreliable narrators and a touch of magic realism.

Kudos to the translator as well - it felt like the novel was originally written in English, and not in German.

This was a great way to start a new book year :-) ( )

Beaucoup de qualités, mais décousu (comme la tenue de Tyll?) ( )

Brilliantly inventive. Clever. Reviewers have--accurately in my judgment--called it "a rip-roaring yarn" (The Guardian) and "a rollicking historical picaresque" (Publisher's Weekly). Kehlmann has a gift for description and some of his set pieces are extraordinary works of description and terribly moving. And that's the problem: this is all that...but no more. In the end the book left me feeling that it was less than the sum of its parts. The book is a tale of Tyll’s life (he moves the historical Till Eulenspiegel from the 14th century up to the early 17th century and the Thirty Years War). He tells the tale, or the life, in episodes and the episodes never added up to a full life. Not even close, sadly. Tyll is wonderfully alive in the beginning but as the new episodes add more brilliant stories, he becomes almost a stick figure, the same aspects of his character shown, the same bits told over and over, as if Kehlmann had spent so much time on creating his contexts that he ran out of imagination when it came to placing his protagonist in them. Make no mistake: he is a great writer (and Ross Benjamin’s translation is terrific)…but ultimately I found myself disappointed despite the inventiveness, the cleverness, and the ingenious and even inspired situations. ( )

um conto de bruxas na Alemanha da idade media

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2023/05/review-of-tyll-novel-by-daniel-kehlmann... ( )