Last night I had a public conversation with the German (also a little bit Austrian) author Daniel Kehlmann in a theater in Amsterdam.
We discussed Nabokov, Bernhard, power, the necessity of lying, fame, reading tours, Kehlmann’s works, critics and other important topics.
In 2006 Kelhman wrote an op-ed piece in the NY Times in defense of Günter Grass who was accused of having come out of the closet about his past to enhance his book sales: “Ambitious like most good writers, Mr. Grass must have had his eye on the Nobel Prize from early on. He knew he deserved it. The question of why he remained silent for so long about his past is in fact easy to answer: one visit with the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was sufficient for Borges never to receive the prize. Would someone who had served in the SS stand a chance?”

I asked Kehlmann if it was necessary for an author to falsify his own past in order to win the Nobel Prize or if it was better to act as one of the characters in his short story “Unter die Sonne”; a novelist who refuses the Nobel Prize because he doesn’t need “honors of mediocrity”.