Mahler's time

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Mahler's Time is a 1999 novel by Daniel Kehlmann . It is about a young scientist who believes he has discovered the secret of the times and is desperate about it.

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Three central questions serve as a guide to the plot in the novel:

“How likely is it that a passerby will watch a balloon go up on his morning walk and step over its yellow rubber scraps in the evening when he goes home? How likely is it that a deck of cards will be sorted by colors and values ​​after shuffling? How likely is it that a monkey hitting a typewriter will produce all the books of mankind? "

One night a light goes out on any street in any city due to the breaking of a lantern head and the light goes on for the hero of the novel, who lives in that street. Half asleep, he finally found the incredibly simple solution to a task that he had been racking his brain about for a long time. The task in question is to solve the problem of the world order by refuting the second principle of thermodynamics . Comparable to the protagonists in other Kehlmann novels, David Mahler, equally gifted and overweight, is an extreme character.

In this novel, too, Kehlmann skilfully draws not only the main characters, but also all of the secondary characters in his story, from the potato-faced university professor Grauwald, to Mahler's friend Katja, who smokes too much and paints her nails bright red, around the ugly edges from chewing to hide, up to the so desperately sought-after Nobel Prize winner Valentinov, with his pointed nose, the cropped beard and the colorless eyes hidden behind round glasses.

In the inability to make himself understand his present, Mahler is a fellow sufferer of Kehlmann's Gauss and at the same time proof that the 20th century so much awaited by him is of a similar indifference to the 19th century. But while the impression of the protagonist of the measurement of the world , to have been “placed by a weak inventor in a strange second-class universe”, turns out to be a successful self-irony of the author, this realization becomes life-threatening for Mahler. In addition to the authoritative, incomparably higher forces are at play here, and these, Mahler will have to realize very soon, are “not friendly and they have no pity”.

David Mahler - a fat, short-sighted man with a determined expression and a red, poorly shaven face - had never been a favorite of God, as his name might suggest (see David ). But that night when he realizes that it does not take more than four formulas to override the second law of thermodynamics - the only connection between things and time - makes it Mahler's unforgiving enemy. David has found a design flaw in creation, has shaken the extremely fragile framework of the world - the connection between disorder and time - has found a way to relativize the latter, despite all the laws, and thus knowingly into a fight with an overpowering one Go to Goliath . That God, of whom Mahler knows that he “sometimes calculates wrongly”, is now settling accounts with his rebellious creature. Mahler realizes that his whole life has been a series of attempts to keep him from his knowledge and understands that there is now no turning back. So a desperate race against time unfolds , the guardians of the world order and the entropy that all forces of nature use to prevent humanity from learning about the reversibility of time. As every order rushes towards its dissolution, with every step and every line David plunges deeper into his doom and at the end into the vault of the sky, in the blue of which a white-feathered bird of misfortune is reflected, which circles the bottom of a lake.

expenditure

  • Mahler's time . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-41078-4 . 161 pages (hardcover)
  • Mahler's time . Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 3238, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-39738-9 . 160 pages.
  • Daniel Kehlmann reads Mahler's time . Roof Music, Bochum 2006, ISBN 3-938781-24-6 . 3 CDs.

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