Qui tollis peccata mundi

Above us Tyll Ulenspiegel turned, slowly and carelessly — not like someone in danger but like someone looking around with curiosity. He stood with right foot lengthwise on the rope, his left crosswise, his knees slightly bent and his fists on his hips. And all of us, looking up, suddenly understood what lightness was. We understood what life could be like for someone who really did whatever he wanted, who believed in nothing and obeyed no one; we understood what it would be like to be such a person, and we understood that we would never be such people.

Meet Tyll, trickster extraordinaire. Self-centred, eternally childish, or perhaps wise, a disruptor of the highest order. Like the devil, he's a disappearing act.

Tyll, by Daniel Kehlmann, is a somewhat picaresque novel that spans the Thirty Years' War, of which I know very little, and featuring the likes of the Winter Queen and Athanasius Kircher. It's a time of upheaval — religion wars against religion, and religion wars against both witchcraft and science. Modernity wars against tradition. There is no clear winner, and everyone is hungry.

He says: "Are we going to die?"

"Absolutely," says Korff. "Us and everybody else."

He's right again, thinks Tyll, although, who knows, I, for one, have never died yet.

The story skips across Europe nonchronologically, telling of the arrest of Tyll's father for heresy, a quest for dragon's blood ("Dragon blood is a substance of such power that you don't need the stuff itself. It's enough that the substance is in the world."), and the siege of Brno. There be ghosts, Jesuits, and a talking donkey. 

Due to the darkness your thoughts don’t stay with you alone, you overhear those of the others, whether you want to or not.

It seems wherever tragedy lies, Tyll is near, but it's never clear if he incites it, feeds off of it, or is merely happening by, a witness. Angels and demons are both light as air.

A broad lewd grin appeared on the face of the famous man. A strong power now stretched between him and the woman. He was impelled toward her and she toward him, so forcefully were their bodies drawn together, and it was hardly bearable that they had not yet touched. Yet the music he played seemed to prevent it, for as if by accident it had changed, and the moment had passed, the notes no longer permitted it. It was the Agnus Dei. The woman folded her hands piously, qui tollis peccata mundi, he backed away, and the two of them seemed startled themselves by the wildness that has almost seized them, just as we were startled and crossed ourselves because we remembered that God saw all and condoned little.

Life is such that I had difficulty fully engaging in the history and deciphering the politics in play, but there was humour and intrigue and depth at every turn.

See the enlightening interview in BOMB Magazine: Daniel Kehlmann by Álvaro Enrigue.