'Kaminski' Got Nothing

It seems that great artists are always known by certain iconic stories. Who can forget the tragedy of Vincent van Gogh cutting off his left ear lobe after a confrontation with his friend Paul Gauguin? And then there’s Paul Gauguin himself, who is known for his attempt to escape European civilization in search a pre-civilization good life in Tahiti. There is the sadly romantic story of the dwarfen Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who would frequent the Moulin Rouge to pine after the beautiful, tall dancer Jane Avril.

But Daniel Kehlmann, the author of the novel, “Me & Kaminski,” disputes whether one can reduce an artist’s life to such stories. Kehlmann embarks on an ambitious project to chronicle the process of creating a new iconic figure for the 21st century, ultimately finding it to be a futile endeavor. The book itself doesn’t exactly succeed either.

Recounted in the witty and rhythmic voice of journalist Sebastian Zollner, the novel tells of how Zollner, who is just one bestseller away from fame, travels to the countryside to interview the reclusive Manuel Kaminski and write the artist’s definitive biography. But he soon gets sidetracked from this task, finding himself on a road trip with the painter to the city. While this rare chance to spend some intimate time with Kaminski may have seemed like the perfect opportunity to enliven his book with personal anecdotes, Zollner realizes through this experience that to try to contain the artist’s life in a commercial biography would only trivialize this man’s actual experiences.

Kaminski’s early career is the stuff that iconic stories are made of. In fact, as Kehlmann traces the development of his protagonist, Kaminski lives up to the stereotype of the idiosyncratic artistic genius, whose success does not hinge on talent alone, but is shrouded in a certain inexplicable mystique. Initially, the author humanizes Kaminski by depicting the character’s creative struggle as akin to a pursuit of identity: “First there were the botched drawings of a twelve-year-old: humans with wings, birds with human heads, snakes, and swords swooping through the air: absolutely zero evidence of talent.” But then an incident in salt mines, where lost, he “wandered for hours through the empty passageways,” leads to Kaminski finding his aesthetic style and presumably himself. “After he’d been located and brought back out, he locked himself away for five days. Nobody knew what had gone on. But starting from then, he began to paint quite differently.”

And soon enough, he is brushing shoulders with the likes of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, exhibiting his work in the Musée d’Orsay and the Museum of Modern Art. When Zollner meets him, all Kaminski lacks is a biography that will solidify his reputation as an artist with lasting significance, hopefully disproving Kaminski’s own fatalistic prediction that “first one’s unknown, then one’s famous, then one’s forgotten again.”

Zollner serves as the artist’s more dynamic, optimistic foil. He, in all his self-absorbed vanity, is a character you will love to hate, for beneath his flaws lies a self-consciousness with which the reader can identify. While he may be a narcissist, a pompous jerk, and a pathological liar, he is not defined by those qualities alone. Motivated by commercial opportunism, Zollner is initially attracted to Kaminski only to advance his own interests. But after spending time with the man behind the legend, he realizes that there is just too much to capture, that life is too rich to be commercialized. He sees that there is more to life than merely enterprise and decides to throw away the notepad on which he has scribbled copious notes, but to keep intact the camera memory that stores many of Kaminski’s works. Even if they are not relevant to a money-making project, they still retain an importance of their own. After all, tomorrow is a new day, a day to contemplate them, to think: “My thumb lifted itself again as if of its own volition, and I put away the camera. ”

While principally taking aim at the concept of the biography, Kehlmann also engages with modern notions of celebrity. In one particularly memorable moment, Zollner takes Kaminski to a friend’s art exhibit in the city with the intention of garnering advance publicity for the biography he is penning. But in introducing those who frequent these social circles, from the editor-in-chief of ArT magazine to the fledging artists themselves, Kehlmann asserts that blatant self-promotion in an era dominated by the adoration of the celebrity is at its base, a worthless endeavor as it is emotionally unsatisfying: “The evening had been a real success, they’d all seen me with Kaminski, everything had gone well. Yet suddenly I felt sad.”

And yet, while the novel engages with a whole range of important ideas, the problem of the story itself is that Kaminski’s nihilism is too overbearing. Kaminski rants, “you think you have a life. And suddenly, everything’s gone. Art means nothing. Everything’s an illusion.” And his nihilism outweighs Zollner’s much-appreciated optimism, lending the story its rather anti-climactic feel, as everything—the narrative and ideological arc—ends in nothing; neither the biography is written nor is there any satisfying ideological resolution.

Propelled by an admirable purpose, “Me & Kaminski” nearly succeeds in countering the idea that man’s life can be captured in a narrative. But Kehlmann misses something as he attempts to deconstruct the notion of writing a complete biography; he fails to offer a satisfying alternative in its place. Rather, with the unfinished biography lingering in the novel’s foreground, the reader finds fulfillment to be yet another task left incomplete.