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Oct 09, 2007 | ISBN 9780307277398 Buy
Mar 12, 2009 | ISBN 9780307496751 Buy
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Oct 09, 2007 | ISBN 9780307277398
Mar 12, 2009 | ISBN 9780307496751
Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal geniuses of the Enlightenment. Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in 1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the post-Napolean world.
DANIEL KEHLMANN’s works have won the Candide Prize, the Hölderlin Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. He was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at… More about Daniel Kehlmann
“A masterfully realized, wonderfully entertaining and deeply satisfying novel. . . . Addictively readable and genuinely and deeply funny.”—Los Angeles Times“Kehlmann’s lightly surreal style [is] a mixture of comedy, romance and the macabre, with flashes of magical realism that read like Borges in the Black Forest.” —The Washington Post Book World“Elegant and measured in design and expression. . . . What distinguishes Kehlmann are quickness of pace and lightness of touch.”—The New York Times Book Review
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