Measuring The World
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. 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. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to prove that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauss has hardly climbed out of his carriage before both men are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after Napoleon’s fall.
Already a huge best seller in Germany, Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Carol
Brown Janeway
Carol Brown Janeway, a prize-winning editor, translator and foreign rights director at Knopf Doubleday, died on August 3, 2015. She was 71 years old. She was renowned in the publishing world for her dedication to literature in translation.
The first book she translated for Knopf after joining the publisher in 1970 was Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim. She also translated The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard, Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach, The Storm by Margriet de Moor, and Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, among others.
Carol Brown Janeway, a prize-winning editor, translator and foreign rights director at Knopf Doubleday, died on August 3, 2015. She was 71 years old. She was renowned in the publishing world for her dedication to literature in translation.
The first book she translated for Knopf after joining the publisher in 1970 was Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim. She also translated The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard, Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach, The Storm by Margriet de Moor, and Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, among others.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Mixture of detailed research, philosophy and vivid imagination, a philosophical adventure story, including the inner lives of two very different scientists.
Full of humour, written in an effortless style, historical figures as great fictional characters.
Measuring the world contrasts the parallel lives of two numbers-oriented scientists and the world in which they lived. Through his detailing of not just their feats, but also their childhoods and personal lives, Kehlmann indirectly poses the question of measuring not just the substance of the worlds, but also the substance of our lives.