Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann-Reviews

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann,

Translated by Carol Brown Janeway

Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was an indefatigable naturalist and geographer, the first to describe South and Central America scientifically. Carl Gauss (1777-1855) was a mathematician and physicist of genius whose work in number theory, differential geometry and magnetism shaped those fields and many others to this day. Out of these dry bones Daniel Kehlmann(Pic) has constructed a magnificent novel, which is already a bestseller in his native Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

Both Humboldt and Gauss were concerned with the measurement of the world - with the displacement between one part of space and another and the relation of that gap to temporal intervals and theoretical absolutes. Humboldt constantly took readings during his vast journey - the height of every mountain, the line of the equator, the exact number of lice on the head of a servant - while Gauss conceived space as a mathematical reality in which even lines were merely an abstraction; yet his space was, in its way, as full of life as Humboldt's.

Given that its theme is displacement, it is appropriate that the occasion of the novel is a journey. In September 1828, at von Humboldt's instigation, Gauss left his home town of Göttingen to attend the German Scientific Congress in Berlin. Although he meets von Humboldt by the end of the first chapter, it will take the whole book for there to be a meeting of minds between these two giants of the German intellect, with Kehlmann boxing and coxing between the two chapter by chapter.

Their personalities, deftly brought to life with incisive strokes, are not quite what you expect. Although brought up to greatness - largely in competition with his philologist-diplomat brother - the patrician Humboldt is free of pride, forgiving of those less gifted than himself. By contrast Gauss - a child prodigy born in poverty - is overbearing and intolerant. Humboldt's taste for boys hardly emerges; he's the opposite of the licentious courtier, whereas Gauss ruts like a farm animal. There is nonetheless something endearing about the conjunction in Gauss of high theory and low sensuality, as exemplified by his Shandyesque pre-coital leaping up on his wedding night in order to write down a proof.

One of the products of Gauss's unions is Eugen, his poor son who accompanies him on the trip to Berlin, mainly serving as a target for jibes from his father about his stupidity and disappointing inadequacy. Very soon on their journey another of the book's major themes is picked up - the relationship between mathematical and scientific advances and the great coming wave of political revolt that would sweep over Europe in 1848: "Viewed from up close, one could detect the infinite fineness of the web of causality behind every event. Step back and the larger patterns appeared: Freedom and Chance were a question of distance, a point of view. Did he [Eugen] understand?"

After an ironic aside about novels, ("the perfect way to capture the most fleeting essence of the present for the future") and historical novels in particular ("a foolish undertaking for an author, as was becoming the fashion these days, to choose some already distant past as his setting"), we plunge into Humboldt's early life and adventures abroad. He intends, as he tells Goethe and Schiller, to explore the New World. Very soon he is correcting a ship captain's navigation in the nicest possible way, then hauling his Gaussian sidekick Bonpland off a naked brown woman in Tenerife.

Bonpland provides a foil for Humboldt's otherworldliness during subsequent landfalls, always looking for the next shag while his master measures relative dampness and scratches moss off walls. Even though it is Humboldt who is investigating the real, it seems as though the very act of measurement is seducing him away from it, while Bonpland has no such illusions.

Gauss himself has no sidekicks, unless they be numbers, which far from seducing him away from reality bring it closer, making it "clearer and more meaningful in a way it had never been before". His work as a land surveyor, sticking geodetic instruments into the ground to measure relative distances, seems like a distraction from number theory, but it will lead him to one of his greatest discoveries: that contrary to Euclid, parallel lines do meet. And that's not the end of it: space itself is "folded, bent, and extremely strange".

Alas Kant, the only person who might not think this idea mad, does not get it and Johanna, to whom Gauss has proposed, will not have him. He resolves to take curare - by mouth, which, as Humboldt will later tell him, has only a dizzying rather than a fatal effect. Gauss experiences a personal displacement, losing his own "I" as a messenger comes to tell him that Johanna will accept after all: "A knock at the door. A voice, vaguely like his own, called. Come in!" Gauss's dizzy spell is paralleled by Humboldt's encounter with electric eels on the Orinoco (the shock "seemed more like something that belonged to the outside world than to one's own body"). From thence on in the novel the parallel lines of these two life narratives come increasingly close, bringing us back towards the meeting in Berlin, where Eugen finds himself arrested by the Prussian police, after stumbling into a political meeting.

Along the way Napoleon has invaded Germany and been deposed, and Gauss has hardly noticed. Anyway, says Johanna, about conflict she already knows what he's going to say: "Looked at from the future, both sides would cancel each other out and before long nobody would be getting excited about the things people were dying for today." But, she adds, "What difference did that make? Cozying up to the future was a form of cowardice."

Suddenly the time-bending as well as space-bending genius of Kehlmann's construction is laid bare: we might not be able to get that excited nowadays about the Napoleonic wars - during which this novel is set - but reading Johanna's observation about cozying up makes us think about what people in the future may one day think about a present conflict, such as Iraq.

Kehlmann has the contemporary novelist's fascination with territorial politics and the poetics of space. This reassessment of the geographical perspectives and spatial assumptions in literature is in evidence everywhere, from the topomania of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd to Zadie Smith's remapping of Forster's England on America in On Beauty and Jim Crace's reversal of westward migration in The Pesthouse. Measuring the World's power is all the more acute because it harnesses to this spatial turn the sense of history in process which is key to the best historical novels. For readers in Europe today the irony of the ending, which sees Eugen heading westwards to an America that's still an icon of liberty, is no less part of the process. Yet any holder of that point of view should beware, lest they too find themselves translated to another time or place, somewhere with different values. Good novels can be perspective machines like that.