Kaminski is going blind and is living in seclusion with his daughter. Searching for the break that will redeem him in the eyes of his peers, he heads off on a wild goose chase into the mountains to interview the eccentric, legendary painter Manuel Kaminski, with the hope of writing his biography. Sebastian Zollner’s failure as a journalist is matched only by his personal failures: his girlfriend is moving in a new lover before Sebastian even knows he s been dumped. Already a huge best seller in Germany, Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene.įrom the internationally best selling author Daniel Kehlmann, a provocative and wickedly funny novel about two unpredictable men one an artist and the other a journalist, who together embark on an unexpected adventure with uproarious results. Gauss has hardly climbed out of his carriage before both men are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after Napoleon’s fall. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in G ttingen to prove that space is curved. One of them, the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Hum boldt, negotiates savanna and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment.
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