Measuring the world

Lesser men can't understand why they're not as respected as Humboldt, a man who can accomplish more in the morning before coffee than others do in their lifetimes. But Humboldt can only see the world before his very eyes, while Gauss, a cranky son-of-a-bitch and abusive father, comprehends the

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universe as a whole, and can sometimes see the future. The story of their paths' crossing is completed at the end of this book, and their interesting lives seem to fade away, and the next generation takes over.

In the last paragraph the book could be describing itself when it says, "something began to delineate itself in the evening haze, at first transparent and not quite real, but then gradually becoming clearer."

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I loved this. Perhaps since I don't have any history of Gauss or Humboldt, unlike the Amazon 'disappointing look' reviewer. I liked the fact that a good part of it was an 'adventure' book like a trip book about Darwin looking around on Galapagos. That subject matter suits me. The switchbacks from

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quiet German life of a dour narrator and eccentric Humboldt I also liked. All in all I thought the writing was good, transitions clever. This should not be read as a bio or a normal book, sort of a Postmodern take on a historical venue with some historical fiction thrown in.

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While I was reading the excellent [The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World] by Andrea Wulf, I thought it would be a good idea to reread Daniel Kehlmann’s fictional take on Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, [Measuring the World], which was one of my top books of 2009. So, as

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soon as I had finished Wulf’s book, I dove in.

This was a mistake.

[Measuring the World] took as its genesis a meeting between the great scientist and explorer Humboldt and the great mathematician Gauss at a convention in Berlin, and then looks back at their early years of genius and discovery and forward at their supposed interactions from that point. Humboldt travels the world to take its measure, while Gauss’s measurements are all done from the tight radius of his homeland. The first time I read it, I was completely taken with both the dreamlike style and the entertaining take on the work of these two geniuses.

This time, however, having just read about Humboldt, I could not recognize him or those near and dear to him in this book. Kehlmann’s Humboldt has terrible relationships that in real life were close and loving. His Humboldt encourages “the settlement of colonies,” “the conquest of nature,” and “an orderly exploitation of the earth’s deep treasures,” laments the “selfish interests of the workers,” insults natives by desecrating burial sites and stealing bodies, and mocks the idea of evolution. He is the anti-Humboldt, and I couldn’t get over my disappointment.

It’s likely that this was all deliberate. At one point, Kehlmann has Humboldt say, in a discussion of literature and theater:

Artists were too quick to forget their task, which was to depict reality. Artists held deviation to be a strength, but invention confused people, stylization falsified the world. Take stage sets, which didn’t even try to disguise the fact that they were made of cardboard, English paintings, with backgrounds swimming in an oily soup, novels that wandered off into lying fables because the author tied his fake inventions to the names of real historical personages.

However, since Humboldt is not well known today, at least outside of Germany (in large part because of anti-German sentiment after WWI), his character is sure to be taken at face value.

So, if you’re going to read this book, please look at the characters as fictional, and not as real historical personages.

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It's an elegant idea. Gauss and von Humboldt were contemporary Germans and they both discovered much about the world. Restless von Humboldt sets out practically on his own, suffers through insane conditions and yet manages to put large tracks of South America on the map that were previously

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missing. Gauss, a mathematical genius, hardly leaves home.

An easy read, amusing, but liquid. It's fast, even exciting, but then it goes away.

I read this to learn about von Humboldt, but here I'm not sure what to make of it. Kehlmann has endless wonderful details, but cites no sources. We have no way to tell what, if anything, is fact, or if Kehlmann even intended it to be as somewhat factual. I could guess, but I'd almost rather forget it all and find a real biography of von Humboldt.

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You know that opening phase of a book? Where you turn the pages determinedly, as though you're striking matches, waiting for it to light? Well, for me that phase went from the first page to the last. Always it seemed a promising build-up for the coming story, but nothing tangible ever materialised.

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Little vignettes and digressions do not a good book make,and though it was easy enough to read, I was never gripped or even close. It has received plenty of encomia, but for the life of me I have no idea why.

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I finished Measuring the World in two sittings, after letting it lie in my bookshelf for more than three years. I breezed through the first half, and while sleep deprivation probably made me stop, the second half didn't disappoint either. I loved the homour in the writing of what would have

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otherwise become quite a boring book about two (to me) obscure figures, Alexander von Humboldt (I'm more familiar with his linguist brother, William, who makes several appearances in this book) and Carl Gauss: Two quite different men with quite different temperaments, political views and careers, but living as contemporaries and touching each other's lives knowingly and unknowingly (Humboldt discovers and sends a bottle of curare to Europe, which Gauss suicidally contemplates drinking). Kehlmann's fictionalization of their experiences is fascinating and the imagined details are incorporated into the book convincingly. The eccentricities of the two main characters are made charming and somehow inevitable as we get to know their minds. The narrative style was initially a little difficult to get used to, with even dialogue in reported speech, but didn't remain a problem for long.Humboldt's experiences in the New World, particularly Humboldt and Bonpland's adventures along River Orinco were particularly fascinating to me. I liked that Kehlmann didn't stick to conventional "scientific" views of reality but explored unexplained phenomena, but only through Humboldt--Gauss generally seems impervious to these, even during the seance towards the end of the book that affects Humboldt deeply. At the end of the book, your heart cannot help but go out to Humboldt during the disappointing Russian "expedition", and also to Gauss, marginally happier but slowed down and disappointed by age, nevertheless. The themes of journey are recurrent, with Humboldt and Gauss both Measuring the World in different ways: By the end of the book, you wonder along with Humboldt "which of them had traveled afar and which of them had always stayed at home."

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This book was one of those chance discoveries for me (although everyone else seems to have known about it for ages…)—I happened to be listening to Nightwaves, something I don’t often do, when Daniel Kehlmann was on plugging the English translation. It sounded interesting, so I thought I’d

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give it a try. If you haven’t read it, it’s a postmodern sort of historical novel taking as its pivot a meeting between Carl Friedrich Gauß and Alexander von Humboldt at a scientific congress in Berlin in 1828. We see Humboldt’s adventures in the South American rainforest intercut with Gauß’s more domesticated career as a professor in Göttingen; we see them getting on each other’s nerves when they finally meet, and follow the effects of the meeting on them in old age.

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4.5 stars, rounded down to 4.

Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, and Alexander von Humboldt, explorer and "measurer" extraordinaire, meet near the beginning of this book which then looks back over their separate lives from boyhood to their geriatric years,

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following them in two separate close third person POVs. This is a work of fiction, yet delves into many facts of their lives as well.

The best part of this book for me was how Kehlmann captured the POV of someone like Gauss whose young mind moved so much faster than that of anyone else he met, even other brilliant minds of the age. The reason this book belongs on the 1001 Books list, IMO, is because it's about two men whose work made a significant impact (One of Humboldt's achievements was to take enough measurements in enough places to prove that the earth's core is hotter as you get closer to it).

I don't have a lot to say about this book, and am glad I didn't read anyone else's reviews too closely before reading it, because the journey of discovery as you read it is perhaps the best part about the book. I didn't like to the point where I was up all night reading it, so I didn't give it 5 stars (but then, rarely give those out). Plus, this translation has no quotation marks, one of my pet peeves, but I'm glad I kept reading. This is one time when I am glad I didn't read the ending first (after all, I can find out what happened to those men with just a quick google), so I highly recommend avoiding that if it's something you also have a habit of doing.

A couple of quotes:

If anyone asked the professor about his early memories, he was told that such things didn't exist. Memories, unlike engravings or letters, were undated. One came upon things in one's memory which one sometimes was able, on reflection, to arrange in the right order. later (this is re: Gauss' childhood) Most of his later memories were of slowness. For a long time he had believed that people were acting or following some ritual that always obliged them to pause before they spoke or did something. Sometimes he managed to accommodate himself to them, but then it became unendurable again. Only gradually did he come to understand that they needed these pauses. Why did they think so slowly, so laboriously and hard? As if their thoughts were issuing from some machine that had first to be cranked and then put into gear, instead of being living things that moved of their own accord. He noticed that people got angry when he didn't stop himself. he did his best, but often it didn't work.

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