The perils (and joys) of History: Daniel Kehlmann in conversation with Benjamin Markovits

On the last day of the London Review's World Literature Weekend, a press of sticky, gasping booklovers file out of the sultry weather and cram themselves into the London Review Bookshop's aisles to hear a rare treat: world-renowned German/Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann in conversation with American writer Benjamin Markovits.

Kehlmann is the kind of writer to whom the words wunderkind and enfant terrible tend to get applied with disconcerting regularity: still only thirty-six and looking much younger, he wrote his first novel whilst still an undergraduate and achieved international bestsellerdom in 2005 with Measuring the World, his fabulist epic of the Enlightenment. His most recent book Fame was released in translation last year, and he continues to churn out fiction, reviews and essays with a prolific energy which should give the elder statesmen of German-language literature the sweats. Markovits, too, combines youth with startling productivity: he is currently working on the third book in a trilogy about Lord Byron, and his Playing Days, a fictionalised memoir of his time spent playing minor-league basketball in Germany, was released in April to near-universal acclaim.

Our two authors – Markovits tall, grave and soft-spoken, Kehlmann imp-like and twitching with boyish energy – are here today to talk, amongst other things, about history in fiction: what it means to write historically, how the past can be represented, done justice to and still made entertaining.

That last part is the real kicker, and that's where we start: both writers acknowledge that the past, the real past as told in the so-called non-fiction of history books, has both an authority and a formlessness that make the fictional retelling of it horribly difficult. Real lives are depressingly free of the narrative and thematic continuities that make fiction a pleasure to read. As Markovits says, 'there's this problem of the narrative arc. People are born and then they die. It's really sad'. When Kehlmann began Measuring the World, he says, he envisaged it as straightforward historical fiction: he wanted to tell an engrossing story about Karl Freidrich Gauss and Baron Humboldt, the German Enlightenment's most prominent mathematician and natural scientist respectively. The problem, he found, was that he couldn't make it stick: the shelves of the world are full of forgettable historical fiction, and your average boring history book on the subject has far more authority, far more gravitas or, if you like, truth-value, than any of them. He got around this in the end by adopting the tone and register of history books themselves: it allowed him to pastiche the pompous authority of the historian and then have a whole world of fun undermining it with irony, high-jinks, ghosts, dogs with wings and flying saucers (yes, flying saucers).

Markovits is more of a realist, but for him too pastiche is a way out of irrelevancy: when he wrote his Byron novels (Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment), he obsessively re-read the novels of the period to immerse himself in their style, and kept the Oxford English Dictionary on his desk the whole time: if a word wasn't current in the early nineteenth century milieu he was writing about, he wouldn't use it. This might sound limiting, but Markovits is having none of it: as he triumphantly points out, the language of Jane Austen had more far more words for 'self-presentation' than modern English, since the concept was so much more important and complex in the society of the day. Keeping strictly to period language, for him, meant that he had far more resources at hand to evoke the period he wanted to plunge his readers into.

Both writers acknowledge that the biggest problem with historical fiction is the debt it owes to truth, and the violence it does to it. When challenged on his Gauss being 'a bit of a jerk', Kehlmann cheerfully admits that the real Gauss wasn't really so bad, but he wanted a jerk in his book, '...so I mixed in a little bit of Shopenhauer. He was a jerk'. He points out, though, that throughout Measuring the World he allows his characters to rail against their future would-be biographers, and indeed against fiction itself: only two pages in from the cod-historical sonority of the book's first line, Gauss grizzles that: '...in another two hundred years each and every idiot would be able to make fun of him and invent the most complete nonsense about his character'.

It's the ability to let characters, and the past, talk back that we end with. Markovits is attached, though not uncritically, to realism: 'it's good technology', he says. But his twisting of perspectives and conventions is as extreme, if not as hyperactive, as Kehlmann's: he disowns his Byron novels by making them the creations of a fictional writer, now dead, whose friend – one Benjamin Markovits – must now deal with the manuscripts. No-one's really playing with all their cards on the table, and that's what makes it fun. Is this all post-modern trickery? Not at all, says Kehlmann, although as usual it's hard to tell just how much he's joking: 'Post-modern? I'm Pre-modern. The Romantics, you know, they used fragments as well.'

As if to prove the point, we end with a reading from Kehlmann: the haunting, gorgeous and disturbing 'Rosalie Goes Off to Die' from Fame. Rosalie, a pensioner with terminal cancer, takes her last journey to a Swiss assisted-suicide clinic, arguing all the way with her author. Kehlmann reads beautifully and the bookshop goes silent. You don't have to let me die, says Rosalie to the narrator.

    '...At some point it'll be your turn, and then you'll be begging just like me.
    That's completely different.
    And you won't understand why an exception can't be made for you.
    The two things aren't comparable. You're my invention and I'm...
    Yes?   
I'm real!

    Are you?'