What a fantastically funny read! “Die Vermessung der Welt” is two biographies in one, lovingly weaving together the lives of Carl Friedrich Gauß (Gauss) and Alexander von Humboldt, both of whom lived and changed German science in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Both men, as good scientists, had an obsession with knowledge. Humboldt, tiny and possibly homosexual Prussian aristocrat with a famous older brother and a thirst for adventure, without much talent for human interaction, tirelessly and with little regard for his fellow travellers, measured most of South America, in the process accidentally tasting human flesh, forming strange attachments to a stray dog, mapping the canal connecting the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and stealing human corpses. Gauß, from a poor family and reliant on patronage, impatient with the slow wit of everyone else he met, at least partially aware of the social faux-pas he committed, turned his mind to several big mathematical problems at a time and completed his masterpiece, the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, in his early 20s, and was known as the prince of mathematicians.
Kehlmann’s genius lies in the exclusive use of indirect speech between all of his characters, which creates a comical distance between reality and these extraordinary protagonists although I cannot vouch for the English translation as I read this book in German.
This book has to be taken with a pinch of salt, however, as some liberties appear to have been taken with facts and many anecdotes are so droll they must have been invented by the author. But the alternating (and then joining) chapters of Humboldt versus Gauß are so hilarious and the characters Kehlmann shapes so infuriatingly strange and German that I personally wouldn’t care if it was pure fiction.
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