MEASURING THE WORLD
by Daniel Kehlmann trans. by Carol Brown Janeway

MEASURING THE WORLD is the fifth novel by the 31-year-old Munich-born Daniel Kehlmann. In Germany, where it was published in 2005, it has sold almost a million copies, displacing Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code at the top of the bestseller lists. With Carol Brown Janeway’s enjoyable version among some 30 translations commissioned around the world, the book is the most successful German novel since Patrick Süskind’s Perfume.

Like Süskind’s book, Kehlmann’s is an historical fiction, but there the similarities end. Süskind evoked the dark side of 18th-century France in such vivid gothic detail that the reader could almost, well, smell it. Kehlmann’s main characters are two historical figures, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, their parallel lives woven into a narrative packed with incident and colour. His real interest lies more in the comedy of character and ideas than in authentic reconstruction of the late-18th and early 19th-century milieu.

He explores their epoch’s understanding of itself and of the world, and considers how it may have differed (or not) from our own. The distance between then and now is a rich source of irony, playfully mined to humorous, and sometimes moving effect.

Von Humboldt and Gauss are a delightful study in contrasts. Both are eccentric, engaging figures. Both set out to know the world. Wittingly or not, they map the limits of scientific knowledge and method.

Humboldt, born into privilege, crammed with learning from an early age, takes an empirical, positivist view. He will go everywhere and see everything, measuring, naming and classifying all he finds. Equipped with the most expensive surveying equipment a man can buy, he crosses oceans and continents, navigates the Amazon and the Orinoco, treks through mosquito-infested jungle, climbs mountains, crawls into caves. He eats with cannibals, shuts dogs in a room with crocodiles (don’t ask), steals human bones.

Throughout he remains a Prussian, severe, unbending, not quite at ease with other men (and certainly not with women). Kehlmann, in an essay on the principles of historical fiction, has described him as a cross between Don Quixote and Hindenburg.

Gauss is more down to earth. Escaping from poverty thanks to his prodigious mathematical talent, he sticks close to his peasant roots. Bad-tempered, a poor father and unfaithful husband, he has no wish to travel or to see more than he must. Grumbling in his Göttingen study, he plots the orbits of the planets and works out that space is curved. He knows how things are without ever leaving home.

For Humboldt, knowledge is a refuge. “Whenever things were frightening, it was a good idea to measure them.” For Gauss there are no easy consolations. “The world could be calculated after a fashion, but that was a very long way from understanding it.”

Gauss sees what Humboldt will not: that their knowledge, so hard won, will be — is being, has been — overtaken by other discoveries. “It was both odd and unjust, said Gauss, a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-à-vis the future.”

Life goes on. At the end, Gauss’s rebellious unloved son is on a steamship at sea; a new generation en route to a new existence in a new world.

Quercus, £12.99; 259pp £11.69 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 or buy here

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