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And he keeps the pages lightly turning while musing deeply, like so: “Consciousness is a mere flicker, a dream that nobody is dreaming.”

Kehlmann, whose 2005 novel, “Measuring the World,” made a name for him in Germany, shows off many talents in “F.” He’s adept at aphorism, brainy humor and dreamlike sequences. Each son’s tale reads like a satisfying novella, and the three eventually dovetail in a way that surprises without feeling overdetermined.

Did you have to be aware of your own belief?”), one a Bernard Madoff-like pyramid schemer and one an art forger. One becomes a faithless priest eager to believe (“Perhaps I already believed without knowing it. This opening scene is effective enough, but “F” really takes off with the ensuing portraits of Arthur’s sons after they have grown up. The hypnotist puts the skeptical Arthur under a spell and tells him to “change everything.” Soon after coming to, he abruptly leaves his family to become a famous writer. In 1984, Arthur Friedland takes his three young sons to see a hypnotist perform. Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway As in a previous trilogy that featured two bumbling philosopher frenemies, he manages to both send up intellectual life and movingly lament its erosion. Iyer, himself a philosophy professor in England, is a deeply elegiac satirist. They know they are “too late for politics” and “too late to march on the streets.” Mr. The narrator, a student named Peters, relays Wittgenstein Jr.’s entertaining rants about subjects like his hatred for dogs and why England can be seen as “the quintessence of lawn.” The professor’s brother committed suicide and now he “means to enter the region in which his brother lost his mind, and to come back out.” Like the actual young Wittgenstein, he’s searching for a logical solution to “all the fundamental problems of philosophy.” His students continually disappoint him - and themselves. (more for his “visible despair” and tormented mind than any physical resemblance). In the philosophical prankster Lars Iyer’s latest, a group of students at Cambridge nickname a professor Wittgenstein Jr.