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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture ‘Measuring the World’: A novel of journeys

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10/04/2009‘Measuring the World’: A novel of journeys

‘Measuring the World’: A novel of journeys Expatica reviewer Ruth Zein explores the world through the eyes of naturalist and adventurer Alexander von Humboldt and his partner Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Who goes farther – the traveler or the mathematician? Two scientists set out to measure the world – one travels the globe with an ever expanding collection of instruments, the other tries to never leave home. Alexander von Humboldt, naturalist and daring adventurer, and Carl Friedrich Gauss, the greatest mathematician in Germany, were famous scientists of the Enlightenment period before they became the main characters in Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Measuring the World.

Alexander von Humboldt’s resume is filled with firsts and extremes. Born into the minor nobility, “he had discovered the natural canal that connects the Orinoco and the Amazon; he had climbed the highest mountain in the known world . . . measured every river, every mountain, and every lake in his path.” He, like Gauss, was strongly influenced by his mother. A week after she died, he resigned his position as mining inspector, acquired “the most expensive arsenal of measuring instruments ever to be possessed by one person,” assembled a team and set off to measure the world.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) Gemälde von Joseph Karl Stieler, 1843Kehlmann spins out Humboldt’s journey in one of the most interesting travel narratives ever published. Early in the nineteenth century, Humboldt traveled Spain while the Inquisition was still powerful, catalogued the plants of the New World and conquered Chimborazo. After six months in Trinidad, “Humboldt had examined everything that lacked the feet and fear to run away from him.” He had measured the color of the sky, temperature of lightning flashes and the weight of hoarfrost at night.

Moving through South American in the path of Aguirre, he and his colleague Bonpland found the channel that connected the Orinoco and Amazon rivers but turned back before reaching the source of the Amazon. “It angered him that now some other person would find the source of the Amazon.” Napoleon hated Humboldt and Bonpland because “three hundred of his scientists in Egypt had accomplished less than the two of them in South America.”

Gauss also came to Napoleon’s attention. Because of him, Napoleon had chosen not to bombard Göttingen. Gauss was born to a gardener and a mother who could neither read nor write in a small town known for its work ethic (his father said a German “was someone who never lolled”) and for its residents’ slowness in thinking, speaking and taking action. His mathematical genius was discovered accidentally, when his teacher gave the class a busy-work assignment to add up all the numbers from one to 100. Three minutes later, eight-year-old Gauss produced the right answer. Twelve years later, he published his life’s work.

Gauss owed his success to sitzfleish, something Kehlmann describes as the ability to sit for a long time in a hard chair, the persistence and concentration needed to solve the riddle of the frequency of prime numbers and to write novels that do not sound like textbooks. Gauss always prioritized his work first. He barely noticed his wife’s pregnancies and missed the birth of his son.

One of the book’s most amusing events occurs on his wedding night. Gauss had barely started making love to his bride when “he was ashamed to realize that in this very moment he suddenly understood how to make approximate corrections in mismeasurements of the trajectories of planets.” Fearful of forgetting the important discovery, he jumped out of bed and wrote it down. No surprise that Gauss was hiding in bed when the coach came to take him to Berlin to meet Humboldt at the German Scientific Congress in Berlin. Not having left home for years, he declined repeatedly but Humboldt was adamant.

“The Restoration lay over Europe like a blight,” and both scientists were “growing old in a second-class era,” but the time of the metropolis had come. Cities like Berlin and London were measured by “the crowds, the size of the houses, the dirty sky.” There, in the emerging metropolis of Berlin, with “the measuring of the world almost complete,” the two scientists shared their stories and found a project they could work on together.

It is no easy thing to bring history to life and Kehlmann seems to be fishing for compliments when he writes these words for Humboldt, “It must be a foolish undertaking for an author . . . to choose some already distant past as his setting.” Kehlmann breaks the rules brilliantly. He reinvigorates the somewhat old-fashioned indirect conversational style, the pitch-perfect tone to give vraisemblance to an historical novel. Never once does the reader question how he knows what his characters do and say.

Kelhmann, thirty years old when the novel was published in 2005, is the new German writer – optimistic instead of morose, funny but not satirical. No bitter rants from him. He says Thomas Bernhard is too angry. Think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories in One Hundred Years of Solitude told through the glittering façade of Vladimir Nabokov’s writing style. It is almost as if Kehlman created the entire story from the gypsy’s words to Marquez’ patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia: “Science has eliminated distance.”

Ruth Zein/Expatica


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