u/washsports8

Just finished this and quite enjoyed it. Thought Kehlmann did a great job positing whether the value of art supersedes circumstance. I had a question for anyone else who read - what was the throughline with the name Molander/why did Pabst choose it as the new name for the family in the story about the violin? I know that was the first film maker he experienced, at something of a carnival. But I can't figure out a deeper meaning for him using that last name later on. Is there one?

But I hope someone else did

- "You stop loving someone when you stop loving someone, which happens when you stop loving them because you stop loving them." - this was the climactic meditation

- "My heart does a standing ovation for that laugh."

- An Adam's apple described as buoyant

- The reveal that the main character is working with >!NEO NAZIS !<

- "I didn't understand how profoundly lonely it can be to be, well, smarter than everybody else."

- After a long description of the character witnessing an impromptu protest: "Something is going on." - astute, Watson!

- The word banal used so often I wondered if it was a form of exposure therapy

I just finished the Known World and found it captivating and fascinating, in both its narrative, and its conception. The idea that an imagined world is real to an author, and only he can let us know it, with his limited time, vocabulary, etc, is moving and haunting to me. The terror of one's own mortality drives their fiction, in a way, because the world dies with you. Would love to hear anyone else's thoughts on the novel.