Measuring the World
A Novel
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3.4 • 21 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The brilliant debut novel by the author of The Director portrays the comic collision of two radically different Enlightenment geniuses--one who explored the world in person, and the other who pushed the boundaries of the universe in his own head.
"Kehlmann's lightly surreal style [is] a mixture of comedy, romance, and the macabre, with flashes of magical realism that read like Borges in the Black Forest."—The Washington Post Book World
"Addictively readable and genuinely and deeply funny." —Los Angeles Times
Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in 1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the post-Napolean world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Loosely based on the lives of 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt and a contemporary, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kehlmann's novel, a German bestseller widely heralded as an exemplar of "new" German fiction, injects musty history with shots of whimsy and irony. Humboldt voyages to South America to map the Orinoco River, climb the Chimborazo peak in Ecuador and measure "every river, every mountain and every lake in his path." Gauss is the hedgehog to Humboldt's fox, leaping out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a formula and rarely leaving his hometown of G ttingen. The two meet at a scientific congress in 1828, when Germany is in turmoil after the fall of Napoleon. Other luminaries appear throughout the novel, including a senile Immanuel Kant, Louis Daguerre and Thomas Jefferson. The narrative is notable for its brisk pacing, lively prose and wry humor (curmudgeonly Gauss laments, for instance, how "every idiot would be able to... invent the most complete nonsense" about him 200 years hence), which keenly complements Kehlmann's intelligent, if not especially deep, treatment of science, mathematics and reason at the end of the Enlightenment.
Customer Reviews
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This book is almost stream of consciousness - no coherent structure or timing. It wants to get into the minds of Humboldt and Gauss, but only succeeds in providing a surreal landscape of extraneous fathomings.
I never got a real understanding of either the mental workings or the practical happenings of either man.
Where is the story for the title?
After reading 10% with no direction evident, I moved on.