MEASURING THE WORLD

• What a lucky find! – An intelligent, entertaining read, brilliantly written.
• Kehlmann's most famous novel sold over 2,5 MIO copies in Germany! 
• Translated into 50 foreign languages! 
• One of the biggest successes in post-war German literature.

Towards the end of the 18th century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates savanna and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, tastes poisons, counts head lice and explores every hole in the ground. The other, mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauß does not need to leave his hometown Göttingen to prove that space is bent, cannot imagine a life without women and yet jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Famous and slightly eccentric with age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauß has hardly climbed out of his carriage before the two are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after the fall of Napoleon.

Daniel Kehlmann portrays the lives of two geniuses, their yearnings and weaknesses, their tightrope walk between love and loneliness, ridicule and greatness, failure and success with a great deal of humour and imagination. A philosophical adventure novel of rare power and brilliance.