Measuring the World

[Otto]

Geniuses at Work
By TOM LeCLAIR
Published: November 5, 2006
MEASURING THE WORLD
By Daniel Kehlmann. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway.
259 pp. Pantheon Books. $23.

What a wonderful country Germany must be. "Measuring the World," which
resembles nothing more American than a pint-size novel by Thomas
Pynchon, displaced J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown from the top of the
German best-seller lists. Like the young Pynchon and the novel's
subjects — the early 19th-century German scientists Alexander von
Humboldt and Carl Gauss — Daniel Kehlmann is something of a prodigy.
At 31, he has written a collection of essays and five other books of
fiction. "Measuring the World" is his first work to be translated into
English.
(...)
Kehlmann is a little self-conscious about playing with history and
authority. He has Humboldt complain about "novels that wandered off
into lying fables because the author tied his fake inventions to the
names of real historical personages." "Disgusting," agrees Gauss. An
admirer of magic realism, Kehlmann takes some liberties with
biography.
(...)
More problematic than "lying fables" is this novel's slim size. While
one might not want Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" to be a page longer than
its 773, "Measuring the World" can't calibrate with much robustness or
precision two lengthy and rich lives in its 259 pages. The personal
histories and published works of Kehlmann's subjects were extremely
messy. "Measuring the World" is elegant and measured in design and
expression. "The map is not the territory," the semanticist Korzybski
reminded us. The novel is like one of Humboldt's maps or Gauss's
formulas, the work of a probable prodigy but not prodigious,
large-minded but not as large as its materials required.

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