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“Years later, long since fully grown and each of them enmeshed in his own particular form of unhappiness, none of Arthur Friedland’s sons could recall whose idea it had actually been to go to the hypnotist that afternoon.”

Daniel Kehlmann’s sixth novel begins on an odd note and gets progressively odder. The Brothers Friedman, abandoned by their father and committed to vocations with which they’ve long since become disillusioned, are very entertaining narrators. The book follows each of them through their weary neglect of duty, and documents the startling, cynical coping mechanisms that stand between them and farcical nihilism. Martin is a priest who snacks in the confessional booth, Eric is a driven businessman trying to stave off the reality of his bankruptcy, and Ivan is an artist whose insight into the baffling logic of the art world have led him into dubious moral territory.

F is a novel about family history, one that goes to some unusual lengths to show how life gets shaped by circumstance and odd historical context. Kehlmann’s terse prose pulls the reader through the novel’s most ludicrous scenes, backwards and forwards through time and then again into a (supposedly) mundane world made to feel all the richer for the strange things that came before. F’s characters inhabit roles very familiar to the reader, but ones that are invigorated in his mischievous look at postmodern life. As a reading experience, F is not a book that will let you settle into a journey with its characters, and it’s hard to say exactly what insights it wants you to take from it at all. Comic, slightly dark, and wilfully blank in the face of traditional questions about motivation and moral lessons, this book is one you’ll end up getting through very fast or despairing of completely.