Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
(Pantheon Books, $23)
In 2006, a 32-year-old German novelist who has been likened to Nabokov, Proust and García Márquez outsold, in Germany, books by JK Rowling and Dan Brown. At first sight, Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt) looks like a perfect example of cerebral German Hochkultur. From a British perspective, it is hard to understand how a novel about two real 18th-century scientists—the physician and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss—can be in the bestseller charts for 71 weeks, hogging the top spot for 37 weeks, and selling more than 1m copies in hardback.
But there is an easy answer to the phenomenon of Daniel Kehlmann. The German public has traditionally reserved a special place for “geniuses”—a notion developed by Kant and championed by the Romantics. And Measuring the World is a book about two geniuses, penned by a potential third.
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