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Measuring the World A Novel Daniel Kehlmann Carol Brown Janeway Books

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Measuring the World A Novel Daniel Kehlmann Carol Brown Janeway Books

For those of some scientific bent or even those with slight curiosity about the workings of the world about them, this book is fun from end ot end. Kehlmann's got to be very sharp in a multitude of disciplines to portray as cleverly as he does. Oddities of nature blended with those of the human sort will make this book pass all too fast. Don't feel bad though. There's probably enough you'll miss on the first pass to make a second just as much fun. Or, take your time and let it sink in. The water's deeper than you think.


Tags : Amazon.com: Measuring the World: A Novel (9780375424465): Daniel Kehlmann, Carol Brown Janeway: Books,Daniel Kehlmann, Carol Brown Janeway,Measuring the World: A Novel,Pantheon,0375424466,1769-1859,1777-1855,Fiction,Fiction - Historical,Fiction Historical,Gauss, Carl Friedrich,,German Novel And Short Story,Historical - General,Humboldt, Alexander von,

Measuring the World A Novel Daniel Kehlmann Carol Brown Janeway Books Reviews

I found this book interesting but not riveting. This may be because the structure of telling the parallel stories of two German scientists from the 19th century is maintained at the expense of a satisfying plot. Or perhaps the use of reported speech rather than dialogue became tiresome.
I think perhaps the novelty made this a best seller, but that wasn't enough for me.
Some chapters were a little slow...but in some passages the words just reached out and grabbed me and I couldn't look away!
As others have pointed out, this is an interleaved biography of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, two of the greatest German men of science at the start of the nineteenth century. Despite being contemporaries, they are as different as could be in background and methods Gauss, from a modest family, is a stay-at-home thinker; the aristocratic Humboldt finds fame as a world explorer. For two-thirds of the book, Kehlmann tells their separate stories in alternating chapters. He is particularly entertaining when describing the intrepid but rather naif Humboldt, who climbs Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, and tastes curare to prove it is not poisonous when ingested, but is shocked to discover than women have body hair just like men. Kehlmann narrates all this in a deadpan style that is often very funny. He has a harder time conveying the importance of Gauss to mathematics; unlike other recent novels about mathematicians such as David Leavitt's THE INDIAN CLERK or Yoko Ogawa's THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR, he avoids anything technical, making it difficult to show the man as much more than a misanthrope at first. More comes through towards the end when Gauss turns his mind to more practical matters such as chemistry, physics, and technology.

Indeed, this seems to be the main thrust of the book, that Gauss becomes more practical whereas Humboldt, who started as the supreme man of action, ends virtually emasculated by his own fame. But since there is really very little to connect the two men other than the author's demonstration of their differences, the final sections of the book, when the two men finally meet, seem narratively contrived and tail off into confusion. In some respects the novel is reminiscent of ARTHUR AND GEORGE by Julian Barnes, which also starts with two separate historical characters, and also ends in deliberate anticlimax. But whereas Barnes focuses on a real encounter that changed the lives of both protagonists, Kehlmann's great scientists pass like ships in the night. All the same, Humboldt's realization as he is returning from an exhausting and fruitless tour of Russia is apropos and poignant "But as the first suburbs of Berlin flew past and Humboldt imagined Gauss at that very moment staring through his telescope at heavenly bodies, whose paths he could sum up in simple formulas, all of a sudden he could no longer have said which of them had traveled afar and which of them had always stayed at home."

Over and above the story of these two men, the book offers a fascinating glimpse of the intellectual climate in Germany in the early 1800s, an interesting pendant to the more delicate portrait of early German romanticism painted by Penelope Fitzgerald in THE BLUE FLOWER, her novel about the poet Novalis.
A delightfully funny book. I wish I could read it in the German. There is a dry sense of humor that runs through the prose. This is the German ode to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 100 Years of Solitude. It has the same madness but coupled with a maddening but lovable German love of precision and accuracy and a fanatic scientific curiosity about the world.
Measuring the World combines biographic material on Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Frederick Gauss in a novel of their lives and interaction together. It is translated from the original German which perhaps adds to the confused and jumbled story line and time frames. Humboldt apparently spends several years in exploring the Orinoco/ basin of South America in the novel but really completed his work there in less than six months. Gauss goes from being a young mathematical and scientific genius to a plodding bureaucrat within possibly a few years in the book whereas the development covered most of his adult life. I found Measuring The World to be a fantasy of the lives of these two great men and can only wish that the author had stayed closer to the facts in constructing his historical fiction.
. . . are both great mathematicians of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries in Germany. Humboldt journeys across Europe, crosses the Atlantic to South America and maps the Orinoco River, measuring every geographical feature, and even social features, that can be measured or counted, making huge volumes of notes. Gauss measures the universe from his desk, but does depart to do his own measurements across Prussia and Russia. But all the math is wrapped most humorously in the astounding events and comic relationships, the contrasts and ironies surrounding their separate tales. There was a political tragedy befalling persons close to them, not to mention diseases and the stresses involved with travel and adventure in the world of 1800. Kehlmann’s sense of humor intertwines with his keen appreciation for hardship and mathematical genius throughout the narrative.
Just didn't read well as dialogue or plot. I had expected more from summary and reviews. Perhaps it is the translation, but I never felt like I was "in the time" or cared about the characters.
For those of some scientific bent or even those with slight curiosity about the workings of the world about them, this book is fun from end ot end. Kehlmann's got to be very sharp in a multitude of disciplines to portray as cleverly as he does. Oddities of nature blended with those of the human sort will make this book pass all too fast. Don't feel bad though. There's probably enough you'll miss on the first pass to make a second just as much fun. Or, take your time and let it sink in. The water's deeper than you think.