Can you make sense of someone else’s life if you don’t understand your own? Daniel Kehlmann’s novel might seem playful on the surface but it asks deep questions and, satisfyingly, refuses to answer them. It is slighter than Measuring the World, his European bestseller, which playfully and provocatively brought together the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and the geographer Alexander von Humboldt. The two principal characters here have rubbed shoulders with people whose names appear in reference books, but it is their fictional involvement, rich in irony and unpredictability, that offers us the unfakeable pleasure of sneaking an oblique glance at something real.

Kaminski is a modernist painter, now old and apparently blind, living in a remote mountain district. Sebastian Zollner, a crass journalistic biographer, can’t do Balthus because he has just died and he can’t do Lucian Freud because someone else is rumoured to be on the case. So he decides to generate a bestseller by reuniting Kaminski with Therese, a former lover the artist bel-ieves to be dead. He insinuates himself into Kaminski’s household by bribery, chutzpah and lies. After some picaresque adventures, they learn that Therese is a happy grandmother, serenely indifferent to her past, and that Zollner has been scooped by a rival.

Boswell comes to mind, not only because Kehlmann chooses an excerpt from his journal as epigraph. Zollner (who tells the story) is also full of vanity, seeking self-esteem through the pursuit of a great man. He is quarrelsome over trifles, preoccupied with his appearance, certain that women will fancy him, a gate-crasher, a voyeur, opinionated far beyond his mental means and incapable of telling whether Kaminski’s cryptic remarks are barbed or just confused. Yet, as with Boswell, his narcissism isn’t merely self-enclosed; he is capable of revealing more than he seems to deserve. His very banality allows him to come, however obliquely, into contact with the truth.

He is the recurrent vehicle for some acute if unoriginal satire. He plagiarises professors and encyclopedias but can’t remember what kind of art he’s supposed to like. When Kaminski discusses how “reality changes with every glance”, Zollner thinks that he has said “absolutely nothing that was usable”. There is an appropriately grisly private view, full of flank-rubbers and name-droppers in preening or predatory mood; and, by contrast, there are Kaminski’s own pungent views, telling Claes Oldenburg that his work is “worthless nonsense” or considering whether Bosch’s Tree-man is a devil, a self-portrait or both. Therese’s cheerful apathy (she’s waiting for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to come on television) puts the whole earnest business of art into a broader human perspective.

Kehlmann develops the story with clever, controlled indirection. There are fragments of apparently vital letters that may or may not have been read or understood; old people divulge contradictory memories. The story moves easily, but with an increasing sense of pressure, from a village where people talk broad dialect via a motorway journey that includes encounters with a mysterious hitchhiker and a small-time prostitute to a town by the sea. There is a powerful hallucinatory flashback to an episode in a salt mine, and there are glimpses of unsigned, undated paintings of distorted faces, contemptuous eyes and blurred shaky features.

We are involved as readers because we want to determine who is leading whom and we can’t. Zollner’s solipsism is absurd, and yet as he moves through levels of deceit and self-deceit he seems gradually to reach a place where he might understand Kaminski’s daughter’s assertion that “you were just as much in his hand as the rest of us”. In an unacknowledged echo of the philosopher JL Austin, Kaminski declares that “Importance isn’t important.” Near the end of the book there are elusive exchanges in the simplest words: Zollner says, “I’m sorry,” and Kaminski replies, “I like you.” Perhaps realising you have no self is a starting point for carrying on with the rest of your life.

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