<blockquote>What do you mean lies? Heidl said. His tone had altered. Being with Heidl was like eating an ice cream that turned into underarm deodorant that turned into an echidna. [loc. 2505]</blockquote>

Kif Kehlmann, a penniless young writer, is approached by notorious corporate fraudster Siegfried Heidl, who proposes a deal: $10,000 to ghost-write Heidl's biography, in six weeks. Kif, whose wife is pregnant and whose bank account is nearly drained, would like to be able to afford to refuse. He wants to write a great Australian literary novel, not a conman's life story. But he has to make some money somehow, soon, and Heidl has already produced an outline. How hard can it be?

Very hard indeed. The 'interviews' Kif has with Heidl turn into rambling, structureless reminiscence and philosophising, and Kif finds it impossible to extract any usable content from them. Worse, his failure to produce a draft for the publisher is draining his confidence. It's been his ambition since childhood to be an author, but all he has is a heap of disconnected notes, evidence that he can't write a book. Worst of all, Heidl's cheerily nihilistic utterances ("You should give up writing, he said. Have some fun while you can. Before you’re sacrificed.") are having an insidious effect on Kif's own psyche.

And who is Heidl, anyway? It becomes apparent that 'Siegfried Heidl' is the latest in a series of identities, the persona of a master manipulator. Heidl doesn't really change over the course of the novel, although we learn more about his unsavoury past. Perhaps at heart there's nothing there, no first person: a hollow man without the principles, creativity or individuality that Kif values in himself. Kif <u>does</u> change, or rather <u>is</u> changed. Heidl hollows him out.

There is some glorious prose here, and some very funny scenes (some of which are also very dark). I didn't engage with it, though: Heidl is slippery and evasive and seems to have no actual personality, and Kif is self-pitying, ineffectual and all too easily warped by Heidl's company.

According to Flanagan, this novel draws heavily on his own experience of ghost-writing the biography of John Friedrich, a notorious Australian conman who apparently committed suicide rather than face trial. I'm not sure if that means that Kif's reflections on the Australian publishing world ("Though I had nothing to say, I had read enough Australian literature to know this wasn’t necessarily an impediment to authorship") mirror Flanagan's own early experiences. And I hope the denouement of the novel is not written from life.

Read for review, via NetGalley: I have to say that the ARC I received was so poorly formatted (no capital Gs or Ds, random line breaks, etc) that reading it was hard work.

I couldn't get into this book. I found the writing too intense and occasionally over-flowery and the plot a bit contrived.

Nothing happens in this book. Seriously, nothing happens. I was really excited about reading it, expecting twists and turns and messing with your mind. Instead it can be summed up as two men try to write a book together, talk a lot but do little. There was a glimmer of excitement round about the 50% mark but it came to nothing. Disappointing.

i am so sorry! i had a difficult time finishing this book. although the main character, Kif Kehlmann, was interesting, the prose was slow and inconsistent,.

This book was not for me. I found it very confusing and hard to get into, I had no idea what was going on and cared even less. I gave up reading it.

This is exceptionally well written, but I couldn't quite connect with the characters. Will try it again when i'm in a different mindset, but for now I've had to set it aside.

In his latest novel, Booker-prize winner Richard Flanagan digs into his own history to write the story of a poverty-stricken aspiring author - Kif- who is commissioned to dash out a dubious autobiography of a corrupt businessman, Siegfried. The quality of Flanagan's writing - there are some beautiful lines and witty images - and clever structure bring pace and tension to a pensive thriller, creating a chess game as the two men vie for control over the story being told. Unfortunately, the main character's struggles with his craft (at the expense of all else, including his pregnant wife) feels indulgent, while his subject/nemesis never emerges as a character in his own right. Kif's fear that he is losing himself to Siegfried is frequently told but never shown, bringing an artificial air to the proceedings.

“My problem was my task: to create a single, plausible human being out of a man who on any given day could be Princess Di, Lee Iacocca, or Papillon. Or all three in one sentence. For Heidl wasn’t so much a self-made man as a man ceaselessly self-making. He had many births and many parents, and his origins were as mystical and protean as the gods of old. Each incarnation more mysterious than the last, Heidl begat Heidl who begat Heidl.”

Richard Flanagan is best known for his 2014 Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1055365661), although my personal favourite is his 2001 Gould’s Book of Fish, a physically beautiful work which, with its use of different coloured inks, has clear echoes in Nicola Barker’s 2017 Goldsmiths Prize winning H(A)PPY.

Early in his writing career, in the early 1990s, while still an aspiring novelist, Flanagan found himself ghost writing ‘Codename Iago: The Story of John Friedrich’, the memoirs, published posthumously (indeed largely written) after the subject had committed suicide, of a notorious Australian conman. The Australian described it as “one of the least reliable but most fascinating memoirs in the annals of Australian publishing."

Friedrich’s story would itself make a fascinating novel. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Friedrich_(fraudster) for the full details. He took charge of the National Safety Council of Australia, a low-key organisation that was responsible for producing work place safety posters and conducting audits, and turned in into an international rescue organisation, the only real point of comparison The Thunderbirds, complete with helicopters, aircraft, a submarine and also a quasi-militia of its own. The whole edifice was built on a pyramid of bank loans and when it collapsed, leaving AUD700m of unpaid debt, and taking some banks down with it, Friedrich himself came under the spotlight. When captured after a lengthy manhunt, he transpired to have a false identity, not even to be Australian, and in his memoirs claimed an even shadier past for himself including active field involvement across the world with the CIA.
But Flanagan’s new novel doesn’t tell Friedrich’s story, rather it tells a, at times rather lightly, fictionalised version of the ghost-writing of the book.

In the novel, Tasmanian budding-author Kit Kehlmann is working as a labourer, while he tries to complete his first novel, and struggling to support his wife, pregnant with twins, and young daughter.

Meanwhile conman Siegfried Heidl is on bail, with a trial due in 6 weeks. Having signed a lucrative deal for his memoirs he has yet to deliver and a succession of professional ghost writers and editors have quit after failing to make any progress given his infuriating ability to deliver a straight story. Heidl, in danger of not collecting his advance, asks if he can appoint his own writer and his bodyguard / gofer / carrier out of various nefarious tasks, Ray, who is also Kit’s oldest friend, suggests Ray. With no better option the publishers agree, and Kit receives a call out of the blue from Australia’s most wanted. He initially wrestles with in part his conscience (accepting money to make a conman look good) but even more with his vainglorious artistic integrity (he wants to be a literary novelist, not a hack) but ultimately money talks.

He starts work in Melbourne with Heidl, although soon starts to realise what he is dealing with when the paranoid conman tells him the project must be kept top secret – if the banks knew he was telling all they would ‘get him’ – and that he has created a ludicrous cover story, that they are working on a book of German medieval folk-verse, with Kit the author, Heidl the expert and Ray (who couldn’t look less like the part) a technical adviser.

Thus far, the story – with only the names changed to protect the guilty – is essentially identical to Flanagan and Friedrich’s actual story, and indeed the only real departure from the facts in the novel seems to be the destinies of the characters in the aftermath of events.

Indeed parts – Kit’s friendship with Ray, the difficulties of Kit’s marriage including an extended description of a difficult childbirth from the husband’s perspective – seem a little too personal and unnecessary to the plot, although the quality of Flanagan’s writing is as strong as ever.

And this generally feels a very cathartic and personal book: Flanagan has clearly being trying to come to terms with his encounter with Friedrich for 25 years, and this book is his way of working out what he felt at the time. This makes the prose claustrophobic and rather circular at times, but actually makes for a satisfyingly intense reading experience.

Heidl is fond of quoting Nietzsche but also his spiritual predecessor, “the great German installationist, Heidl said. Tomas Tebbe” who as far as I can ascertain doesn’t exist and is therefore a vehicle for Heidl to be able to infuse his own thoughts with historical significance. Heidl/Tebbe is no fan of the Gunter Grass school of autobiography:

“A life isn’t an onion to be peeled, a palimpsest to be scraped back to some original, truer meaning. It’s an invention that never ends. And when I must have looked struck by his elaborate turn of phrase, Heidl added, as if giving directions to a public toilet: Tebbe. It’s one of his aphorisms. “

Instead Heidl is difficult to pin down, never really saying anything false but encouraging the listener (ghost-writer, Board of Directors, journalist, investor or bank loan officer) to spin their own story:

“I learnt the less I told them, the more they made it up. In the end, I didn’t have to make up anything. I was a prophet to them. And you know what Tebbe says about prophets? I had no idea what Tebbe said about anything. The greatest of prophets has but the vaguest of messages, Heidl said. The vaguer the message, the greater the prophet.
[...]
He always seemed able to evoke a mystery, but the moment you sought to penetrate the mystery, he sought to escape what it was he had just suggested. His first feint was to go with your building of the mystery, seeking to draw you in with agreement and encouragement. To have you invent his lies.
.....
He contradicted his own lies with fresh lies, and then he contradicted his contradictions. It was as if he couldn’t exist except in the tumult of self-denial. The necessarily incomplete nature of Heidl’s stories, rather than denying their supposed truth, instead confirmed it. I am not saying Heidl consciously made sure his slow-drip stories never quite matched, and were often entirely opposed. But as an instinctive ruse it was more than effective. For the challenge to reconcile such outrageous lies lay not with him, but with you, the listener. “

And Kif eventually learns to go with the flow – making up his own stories (for example that Heidl met the Beatles) that Heidl likes so much that he decides to incorporate in his own mental biography. Indeed he finds it easier to complete the book after Heidl is dead and he has no need to check the facts:

“The more outlandish, the less related my story was to the few, vague facts he had outlined, the more ludicrous I was, the more pleased Heidl seemed, and the more he would claim that it accorded exactly with his own memory. “

At the novel’s outset Ray warns Kit (as indeed Flanagan was similarly warned) about letting his personal guard down with Heidl who is adapt at picking up on personal facts (in one case from a casual doodle Kit makes) and getting inside someone’s head, and Kit ends the experience fundamentally changed by his encounter, becoming (unlike Flanagan) diverted away from his vocation as a novelist towards reality TV.

And Flanagan uses the novel to make wider points about modern society, indeed the timing of the novel’s release in 2017, when the OED makes post-truth its word of the year, is highly apposite.
In interviews Flanagan has said Friedrich “was a master at inviting other people to invent the worlds he wished them to live in, and perhaps that’s the world we’re in now.” Which he seems to mean not just as a sideswipe at Trump and his political ilk, but also at Facebook and its desire to destroy the boundaries of privacy.

Kit at one point tries to confront Heidl over his fraud but struggles to land a blow:

“You didn’t make money, I said, feeling irritated that he was telling me nothing that wasn’t on the public record.

Does the government make money?

You weren’t the government. You were a business.

Roger that. We were a model business. We won an export award.

You didn’t export anything.

That was a mystery to me as well. But we were a successful business. That’s why they gave me the Order of Australia.

You weren’t Australian.

I didn’t have a passport. There’s a difference.

Mostly there isn’t.

Roger that. The citation for my Order of Australia speaks of ‘the innovative reinvention of a late-twentieth-century business’.

Businesses have to stand the test of the market. Well, we stood that test well. The market gave us seven hundred million dollars.

You never gave it back.

The market never worried about that. It seemed like the future.

You lied to the banks.

I told the truth about our abilities. Showed them our shipping containers. We created jobs. Saved lives. Fought fires. We rescued sailors. Mineworkers. Took industrial training to another level. Set new levels of excellence. And the banks endorsed us, backed us all the way.

With other people’s money. “

And again Flanagan uses this explicitly in the novel as a critique not just of the early 1990s boom of which Heidl / Friedrich were part, but also trickle-down economics, neocapitalism and the pre-crisis financial order and banking system.

Flanagan also uses Heidl’s ‘autobiography’ that was, in fact, largely fiction, to highlight the, to him, worrying tendency of fiction to become autobiographical. From a Guardian interview: ”There’s this idea that a novel can no longer represent reality; that only memoir, which is rooted in an idea of an authentic experience, can. And I think that’s a nonsense.”
And Kit takes a similar line – and indeed names names:
“I asked her what she wrote. Autobiography. It’s what everyone writes now. Knausgaard, Lerner, Cusk, Carrère. All the best writers taking literature somewhere new. “

Which I think the reader is meant to take as a criticism of those writers – although I must admit I am in general terms a fan of what they have done, Knausgaard and Cusk in particular.

So Flanagan perhaps uses the device of his story to settle a few too many scores and drag in a little too much personal history. But nevertheless a fascinating work and, in my view, stronger than his Booker prize winning effort.

Audio interview with Flanagan on the real-life story:
http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/conversations/conversations-richard-flanagan/9032374

Newspaper interview on the book:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/20/richard-flanagan-on-lies-literature-and-australias-greatest-conman

Difficult to get into and a confused storyline I was unable to finish the book

Aspiring writer Kif is rung and is offered a chance to ghost write a biography.of the notorious Siegfried Heidl
It sounds like easy money, but isn't as Heidl is hard to pin down and the truth is as elusive as he is.
Kif seems to have wandered into a hall of mirrors in which every way he turns there is only a distortion of the truth to be seen.
Kif himself is an unsympathethic character who seems to care more about his writing rather than his family who live in relative poverty. He does however explore the nature of writing and what it "costs" to write.
There are the occasional flashes of Australian/ Tasmanian humour in this Doctor Faustus type story.

In the part where Heidl is being elusive I got nearly as frustrated, as a reader, as Kif was. I nearly gave up on the book at this stage but persevered as i had loved his Narrow Road to the Deep North and thought that the author must have more to give.

However the end part of the story concerned with Kif's later life felt "unnecessary" to me. I thought this would have worked better as a novella

Unfortunately I just couldn't get into this book. Other readers I'm sure, will appreciate the different style of writing, but I just didn't enjoy it. Not for me.

This was my first time reading anything by this author and they were unknown to me.

Penniless writer Kif Kehlmann is hired to be a ghost write to write a memoir for a criminal, in six weeks.

The story was written well and the plot was interesting and gripping but it was slow in places with an inconsistent pace

Kif Kehlmann is dreaming of being a writer. With his wife pregnant with twins and their financial situation rather critical, the offer of writing a book is welcomed. Yet, the frame conditions are hard: he will receive 10 000 dollars if he writes the autobiography of Australia’s most wanted fraudster within 6 weeks. Money is money and writing is writing, so Kif accepts the deal not knowing what lies ahead of him. His friend Ray warns him, as Siegfried Heidl’s bodyguard, he knows him quite well and he knows what Heidl is capable of. What sounded like an easy tasks reveals itself a mission impossible. First, Heidl varies the story of his life again and again, Kif does not even know the basic facts and the more he listens to him, the more confused he gets. Second, Siegfried Heidl seems to get into his head, he cannot let go of him anymore and slowly, Kif starts to question his whole life.

If have read other books by Richard Flanagan which could really thrill me, unfortunately, “First Person” does not belong to those. It took almost a third of the book to really get into the novel. Admittedly, it is getting better and better in the course of the time, but I am sure many readers will never reach this point.

Flanagan presents two strong protagonists who are quite appealing and interesting. Kif with his dream of writing a novel sold thousands of times and at the same time struggling with his private life. His head is full with other things, diving into a task such as the ghostwriter’s job seems rather impossible at this moment of his life. And both, his life and the writing, turn out to be incompatible.

Siegfried on the other hand is fascinating because we can never really make up a picture of him. Is he a con man or is he actually super-clever? Which pieces of the story he tells are true (in as much as fiction can be true), which are just narrative? Or as Kif puts it:

“For Heidl wasn’t so much a self-made man as a man ceaselessly self-making.” (pos. 3055)

It is his strange charisma that makes him enthralling and captivating. Kif, too, in his description is oscillating between adoration and disdain:

“I couldn’t decide whether I hated Heidl or admired him, if I was his friend or his enemy, if I wanted to save him or kill him.” (pos. 2877) and yet, “He was the closest thing to a man of genius I ever met.” (Po. 3747)

The dance they do is shows that Flanagan is one of the best writers of our time, but nevertheless, this story just was not one that could capture me completely.

Penniless writer Kif Kehlmann is hired to ghost write a memoir for a corporate criminal, Siegfried Heidl, in six weeks. His research to write the autobiography takes a frustrating form when his subject is reluctant to answer questions that might only further incriminate him when he's already facing prison.

The need for money keeps Kif on board, even when his better judgement tells him to walk away. The story is told in first person, in a style reminiscent of old detective noir, yet portraying a man who was anything but in control of his own destiny.

The story takes a while to get to the meat, but slowly Kif starts getting inside the mentality of a professional con man who doesn't really want the actual details of his life story displayed so much as a comfortable fiction that will serve his purposes.

As the struggle to glean details goes on, Kif starts to question everything he thinks he knows about his world, even who he is, why he got married, how he feels about having children and why he calls himself a novelist when he's never managed to finish a novel. Worse, Heidl begins to tell the truth.

This is a real psychological mind bender that falls into place gradually, the details of what physically happens secondary to the play on perceptions. I found it interesting, but depressing.

This is my first time reading the author. I have his The Narrow Road to The Deep North on my TBR list but haven’t gotten round to picking it up yet.

I loved the premise of the book and thought it sounded like a great read and highly original.

There are some good things about First Person but overall more parts just didn’t work.

I didn’t love the writing style used. The pace is very slow and almost grinds to a halt at times which I found boring and off-putting. This isn’t all the time and I did enjoy reading some parts. It’s just, the writing is very flowery at times, which doesn’t go down well with me and a lot of time is spent reflecting on things rather than using action. Oddly, there are some places where the writing is excellent.

I did like the way the author portrays Kif. He’s a great character. He starts to become uneasy with the choices he’s made, becomes increasingly depressed and his internal struggle really brings parts of the book to life. I loved how he unravels and starts to question his decisions. Ziggy is a whole other level of satanic.

First Person is worth a read even though I didn’t completely love the book.

I'm so sorry. This is the first time that I have had a book from you that I just couldn't read. I have tried and tried, assuming that I needed to give it more time; but I have been wading through it for weeks now and have almost lost my joy of reading.

I was given and advanced copy of this book by Netgalley and Chatto Windus, in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
I have not read any of Richard Flanagan's previous work which I am told is good. I hope this volume doesn't overly colour my view as I didn't enjoy it. It seemed to me to be a self indulgent work where the author having found a promising outline of a plot then fell into to the mire of his lead character. If one is principled and firm of mind is it likely that for a relatively paltry sum you will become totally unprincipled and shallow? I think not and as for the pace of the book it drags and the flowery inserts do nothing to encourage the reader to turn the page. Sorry, this is one for the church jumble sale. I have given it three stars because some of the writing is good and the plot line was a great idea. I morn for the lost volume that could have been.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House UK, Vintage Publishing Chatto & Windus for providing me with a copy of this book.

I read this book with the intention that it was going to be a good read but I was proven wrong. Don't get me wrong other people may find it a terrific and brilliant read but for me it was struggling to draw me in right the way through to the end. so therefore I dot have much to say anout it. In my opinion the blurb made the book sound a much better read than it actually was.

I just couldn’t relate to this book at all and found it tedious and hard work. It’s a psychological thriller with a very interesting premise. Struggling write Kif Kehlmann is offered the chance to ghost-write the memoir of a con-man and corporate criminal. With no money and twins on the way it seems an offer too good to turn down. Except that his subject, Siegried Heidl, brings far more problems in his wake than Kif could ever had imagined and soon the line between reality and fantasy seems to merge and the con-man Kif initially feels so morally superior to begins to disturb his own moral compass. Good idea for a novel, for sure, but for me it just didn’t work. Heidl is too creepy and weird to be credible and although Kif’s personal life is drawn with some deftness I still found myself unengaged. The novel is largely autobiographical, based on an incident in Flanagan’s own life when he was hired to ghost-write a con-man’s memoir, and I can’t help feeling a non-fiction account would have been more successful and would still allow Flanagan to explore the moral complexities he clearly want to.

This did not quite do it for me. A clever premise about a writer struggling to publish his own work so he falls into ghosting the life of a con man. I quite enjoyed the sparring between them and the description of the problems in sorting out the wheat from the chaff and deciding what was true and what was fantasy.

Otherwise the book became too introspective with too much on the art of writing rather than developing the plot.

Impeccably written by a real craftsman but not engaging enough.