The Discovery of Slowness

Sten Nadolny's The Discovery of Slowness is said to have sold more than a million copies worldwide. Funny that neither I nor anyone I have spoken to had heard of it.
The German author's confident evocation of 18th & 19th century Lincolnshire countryside struck me first. Then my own ignorance about John Franklin (pictured). The book is a novelized account of the life of one of England's great explorers, this seafarer who wrote a bestseller about his journeys in the Arctic. He was later governor of Tasmania - though I doubt Tasmania and the Arctic are home to those million readers. Are we really so closed to books in translation, even when they're about Britain? Canongate brought out the paperback here.
The book has a fine line about writing, as Franklin shifts from restless sailor without a commission to author: 'No one who had to write a book could be desperate for ever.'
I feel somewhat the same way as I embark on my biography of J.S.Haldane. A book project is very steadying. And Nadolny's novel offers a curiously fine model. The motif of 'slowness', Franklin's own studied mode of being, is steadily pursued, the book gradually accumulating its effect. The life story is told with line by line care, an assembly of resonant touches.