Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Measuring the World
Daniel kehlmann
Quercus, Rs 395
Measuring the world is set in the late eighteenth century at the height of the German Enlightenment. The novel begins with a meeting in Berlin in 1828 between two great German thinkers of the time 8212; Alexander von Humboldt, the explorer and geographer whose travels took him down the Orinoco and into the Amazonian forests, and Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician and astronomer who claims to be the reason why Napoleon decided not to bombard the town of Gottingen. The novel then goes back in time to narrate, in parallel chapters, the adventures of these two original and highly eccentric minds as they attempt to make sense of the world by measuring it in their different ways.
As we follow Humboldt8217;s travels, we encounter many strange new creatures along the way: apparitions, cannibals, and a mysterious metallic flying disc which floats above Humboldt and his entourage at one point. As we follow Gauss on his struggle, we see him counting prime numbers when under stress; floating up in a hot-air balloon to discover that parallel lines do meet; and working out the orbit of a new planetoid because he knows that such things, popular with the public, can help him get a job and get married.
Moments of delicious and sometimes wicked humour contrast with the controlled and mock-serious tone of the narrative. The humour comes most of all from the quirky characters of Gauss and Humboldt, both of them single-minded in their obsessions, not willing to suffer fools gladly but shrewd enough to know what they must do in order to remain free to pursue their obsessions.
Nevertheless there is an undercurrent of melancholy in the chapters about the later days of the two great minds. Humboldt ends up as a chamberlain 8212; paid, as Gauss puts it crudely, to eat and converse in court. Gauss ends up married to a woman he does not care for, living a life he does not want, and at the beginning of the novel we even see the old Professor hiding in his bed to avoid the conference. It is in the story of Eugen, Gauss8217;s poetry-writing son who is now traveling overseas on a path that Humboldt had taken decades ago, that the future lies.
Already a publishing sensation in its original German, this witty and accomplished novel has been elegantly translated by Carol Brown Janeway. This is 32-year-old Daniel Kehlmann8217;s fifth work of fiction; his first novel was published when he was 22. Kehlmann studied literature and philosophy at Vienna and did his doctorate on the sublime in the works of Immanuel Kant. An aged and senile Kant appears briefly in Measuring the World, as does Goethe, who at one point in the novel utters a sentence that no one can understand. But the novel really belongs to its two brilliant, unlikely heroes, Humboldt and Gauss, quirks and all. And their quests to measure the world.
