Measuring the World (Isis General Fiction) [Large Print] [Paperback]

Daniel Kehlmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2009 | Series: Isis General Fiction

"Measuring the World" recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment - the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Towards the end of the 18th century, these two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world. Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat schooled for greatness, negotiates savannah and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. Gauss, a man born in poverty who will be recognized as the greatest mathematician since Newton, does not even need to leave his home in Gottingen to know that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head, cannot imagine a life without women and yet jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Daniel Kehlmann has produced a novel of rare charm and readability, distinguished by its sly humour and unforgettable characterisation. The author's acute powers of observation and ability to write memorable dialogue shine through its every page. "Measuring the World" marks the UK debut of a distinctive and original voice in contemporary fiction.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From 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 Göttingen. 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. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In 1828, scientist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) summons the great mathematician Carl Gauss (1777-1855) to join his party to Berlin, where he is to be feted before embarking on an expedition across Russia to the Urals. The perpetually testy Gauss, whose great trial in life is that everyone else thinks so slowly, which makes virtually any kind of human interaction infuriatingly boring for him (though he does fancy a fine young figure), would go back to sleep, but his wife, Minna, whom he barely tolerates, rousts him out and gets him on the road with youngest son Eugen. They no sooner arrive at Humboldt's mansion than Kehlmann diverges to recap his two principals' lives and careers in chapters alternately concerned with globe-trotting aristocrat Humboldt and genius-from-the-gutter Gauss, who willingly leaves home only to earn a living and escape Minna. The uncomfortable humor of being, in Gauss' case, too brilliant (he frequently bemoans having to live before the innovations he foresees can be constructed or even understood); in Humboldt's, too focused (he scrupulously abjures whole theaters of human experience to concentrate on measuring), suffuses Kehlmann's heady historical novel, which may especially delight science-fiction connoisseurs. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Isis Large Print Books; Lrg edition (April 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0753180278
• ISBN-13: 978-0753180273
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,065,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must for the Maturin Fan Club, and everybody else, November 9, 2006

By 

H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Measuring the World: A Novel (Hardcover)

This charming little novel is several things at once, as all good books are.

It is a double biography of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Gauss, the two German science giants of the 19th century. They both measured the world, but so very differently.

Humboldt by travelling and looking at things and writing down and measuring, literally, about nearly everything that can be measured. The result was a mountain of knowledge, several volumes of descriptions, and one of the foremost travel books of all times, his Travels in South America.

By contrast, Gauss never left home, apart from some inner German border crossings (Germany was a patchwork of kingdoms and principalities at that time). He grew up in very simple social conditions and was recognized as a child genius by a great teacher. Gauss measured the world by observing the stars and by induction.

Both contributed greatly to scientific progress.

Kehlmann bases the Humboldt chapters largely on Humboldt's travels. That makes the book an adventure story in the tradition of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series. Humboldt's advantage over Maturin: he did not have a captain who kept disturbing his research by calling him back to sea. Another one: he was really "real", Maturin is "only" literature. One wonders why the two did not meet.

This is surely the most appealing piece of fiction translated from German since Patrick Suesskind's Perfume in the 80s.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quirky and Delightful, December 8, 2006

By 

K. M. "literary devotee" (California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Measuring the World: A Novel (Hardcover)

"Measuring the World" compares and contrasts the lives and accomplishments of adventuresome naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and primarily sedentary mathematician/astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss. Novelist Daniel Kehlmann opens with an amusing meeting of the two fifty-something notables at the 1828 German Scientific Congress in Berlin. Then he proceeds to tells stories (factual in the main, but with a few, minor liberties) to catch the reader up chronologically, switching between scientists with each chapter. Kehlmann pokes sly fun at Gauss and Humboldt by rendering them as cartoonish grumbler and bumbling virgin respectively. German society of the period doesn't escape satirical treatment either. This waggish unreality tinges everything and everyone, yet the book doesn't tip into such buffoonery that readers can't be awed and enveloped. Take the Humboldt party's arduous adventures on the Orinoco River. Or Kehlmann's enthralling version of Humboldt and companion Bonpland's mountain trek up thousands of feet breathing thinnest air, crossing frail ice bridges and hallucinating entertainingly as they push on. Gauss, master of deduction (as opposed to Humboldt's inductive inclination), has to settle for a less exciting recollection of his life episodes since he lived more inside his head and in classrooms. The author doesn't aim at comprehensive biographical detail, but rather at signifying scenes. Catching up to 1828, Kehlmann returns to Gauss and Humboldt at the Congress, where they spend less time on science than on a muddled mission aiming to snatch Gauss' son, Eugen, from the clutches of the police. Thereafter, the two men part again. When Humboldt makes his subsequent trip to Russia, he is greeted as an icon, but the pomp and circumstance hinders his actually collecting samples or taking measurements as he did on his earlier explorations in South America. He finds his methods outdated anyway. Gauss, who didn't bother to publish many of his visionary ideas (such as radio) when they first formed in his mind (ahead of those who were actually credited later), also finds that he is a revered professor, but his defining and most august work was completed before he was twenty and he exists now as a reputation, a legend in his own time rather than an ongoing contributor. These two measurers of the world are let lie in a kind of pensive limbo at the end of the penultimate chapter. The final chapter follows Eugen Gauss who is traveling, due to his legal woes, to the New World where, not coincidentally, the innovative edge of science is also shifting. His voyage also symbolizes the scientific methods of Gauss and Humboldt merging.

This English translation of Kehlmann's German novel is a unique read. It is ironic yet moving, oddly structured and perhaps too compressed yet fulfilling, and packed with German inside jokes that Americans might not pick up on yet still carrying plenty of humor that can be. It is also a book that opens many doors for thought about science, scientists, and the human condition. "Measuring the World" deserves to be read and pondered.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Re-imagining the World of Humboldt and Gauss, April 8, 2007

By 

Steve Ruskin (Colorado, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Measuring the World: A Novel (Hardcover)

What a clever little story: paralleling the lives of two of the 18th-19th centuries' greatest men of science as they re-imagine the world. One trajectory follows Alexander von Humboldt as he explores the Americas with his instruments, measuring nature (magnetic currents, temperatures at different elevations, the distribution of flora and fauna) and describing the world in a way never before possible. The other trajectory plots the path of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematical prodigy who rarely left his little German kingdom, yet expanded the inner universe of mathematics more than any thinker before him, making it possible to understand the outer world like never before.

In Kehlmann's artful prose, the lives of Humboldt and Gauss are like parallel lines tracking next to each other--aware of each other's existence, but never touching--until Kehlmann brings them together (as Gauss always new, parallel lines do cross! space is curved!), their lives and their physical and mathematical measurements having measured a world bigger than both of them (as great as they were individually) could have imagined. And each of them realizes the usefulness of the other: measuring the world means investigating nature physically and mathematically. They needed each other all along.

In this empathetic historical novel, Kehlmann emphasizes the anxiety and desperation of both his primary characters: Humboldt's desire to explore South America even if it means risking his life ("Humboldt slid down a scree slope. His hands and face were scraped bloody, and his coat torn, but the barometer didn't break.") and Gauss's tragic wish to be more, and know more, than his circumstances allow ("...the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not," Gauss laments).

As far as imagining an historical moment, one when two great thinkers thought of new ways to understand the world, Kehlmann's short book is an intelligent, eloquent recreation of the lives and endeavors of Humboldt and Gauss. This is a novel reminiscent of Alan Lightman's `Einstein's Dreams,' Russell McCormmach's `Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist,' and even Vonnegut's `Slaughterhouse Five.'