Measuring the World

by Daniel Kehlmann

Book Overview

The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307277399
• ISBN13: 9780307277398
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Exploration by introspection

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann is a tongue in cheek biographic novel contrasting two heros of the romantic enlightenment, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt. Gauss is a dispeptic and erratic genius lacking the will or capacity for social intercourse or sustained relationships (unable to overcome his intolerance of lesser minds). He stays at home in Braunschweig, makes great demands on all around him, is oblivious to wars and human turmoil, and travels the universe through mathematical theories of fundamental physical phenomena such as the nature of space. Humboldt is himself a force of nature - inperturbably energetic, with a restless itch to travel, discover, define, quantify and describe, not only the world around but also its emotional effects on the observer. Measurement trumps ignorance, fear and superstition. An experiment or expedition that fails is forgotten in an instant, superceded by plans for another. He is the complete diplomat, ready for any situation or society, always with one eye on the mirrors of posterity and the press. Yet perhaps they are not completely dissimilar; Humboldt's manipulations exert a similar toll on those close at hand. Their lives intersect with each other and with other great romantics, including Goethe, Schiller, Georg Forster and the other Humboldt (his brother, the linguist, diplomat and politician, who is near as well famed but regularly, to his annoyance, mistaken for the other). They are molded by political circumstances in Europe and the Americas: either anachronisms or revelations, in process or prospect of social revolution. As our heros age they weary, their sharp focus dulls, and their energy is dissipated in the bureaucracy of fame. They are forced into uncomfortable compromises, financially, politically and socially, and they lose the ability to dictate their circumstances on brilliance alone. I particularly liked the fidelity to Humboldt's writings (I hope it is as well done for Gauss). Kehlman's images of anecdotes from "Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent" (just an excerpt from Humboldt's momentous volumes on the Americas) are so vibrant that you feel claustrophobia in the jungle and sense the incredulity of locals, with their own forms of explanation, to this mad Prussian baron who collects skeletons for science. There are tales of the echolocating oilbirds in the caves of the dead, an adopted dog which disappears in green wilderness along the Orinoco, Humboldt's mystical encounter with a jaguar, a bloody experiment in Cuba involving dogs and crocodilians, a random attack by a madman on Amé Bonpland - Humboldt's collaborator, or possibly his assistant depending on who is asked, and deprivations suffered on their semi-successful climb up Chimborazo (then believed the highest mountain on earth - they climbed higher than anyone before but didn't make the summit). If these events were not chronicled through Humboldt's romantic lens

Re-imagining the World of Humboldt and Gauss

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.'

Great minds do not think alike

Very entertaining and refreshingly different. I enjoyed reading about these two great minds, their quirks, thoughts, and lives. The writing style was rich without being overdone. I liked the feel that the lack of quotation marks gave. They were not missed at all. Overall, wonderful.

Geniuses at work and play

It is not uncommon to find fictional accounts of the lives of famous historical figures, nor of encounters between them. Kehlmann's book is unusual in its choice of personalities and in the way in which he creates an entertaining description of the two. In the late eighteenth century, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt had both embarked on the same quest: finding a new way of measuring the world. The two heroes couldn't be more different in character and approach. Gauss believed that "a man alone at his desk" represented the real scientist whereas von Humboldt saw him as a world traveler, collecting the evidence in the field and taking measurements wherever he went. Basing himself on the historical records of their lives and work, Kehlmann has created a tongue-in-cheek intimate portrait of these two scientific giants of their time. Gauss was a child prodigy from poor lower class background. He became known as the "Prince of Mathematicians" for his mathematical genius and who wrote his major scientific work at the age of 21. His name has been attached to many scientific discoveries including magnetism and astronomy. Not much is known of his private life, though, except for the bare facts of family and jobs that he had to support himself. He treated many of his scientific deductions as too easy and commonsensical to write about, only to be annoyed when somebody else published something related. Today we would say he was a curmudgeon kind of character. Count von Humboldt, on the other hand, came from a well-off aristocratic family and was spoiled for options what to do with his life. He and brother Wilhelm, a diplomat and linguist, have been a household name then and now, at least in German speaking countries. Alexander's work as a naturalist and explorer were well publicized during his lifetime. He was the first to explore the geological and botanical diversity of remote regions of Central and Latin America and wrote detailed scientific reports about his findings. He is seen as one of the fathers of biogeography. Later on, his travel bug took him all the way across Russia and almost to China. Late in life, the geniuses meet at the 1828 science congress in Berlin. However, the encounter didn't quite live up to the expectations built over many years of knowing of each other's work in the same area of science. Kehlmann brings his subjects close to the reader by focusing on a series of episodes from each of their lives, alternating between the two. Written in a lively style, he endears us to their personalities, bringing out their strengths and foibles. He introduces us to their scientific findings in a light-hearted easy-going way that capture the essence without overburdening the reader. Rather than creating long section of dialogue, he lets his protagonists express themselves in indirect dialogue. Allusions to contemporary events and issues are sprinkled throughout the narrative and add an often funny commentary. Measuring the

A must for the Maturin Fan Club, and everybody else

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.