num_pages: 272
description: Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal geniuses of the Enlightenment.Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in 1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the post-Napoleonic world.
language: English
title: Measuring the World
titlecomplete: Measuring the World
characters: Aimé Bonpland, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Eugen Gauss, Alexander von Humboldt
genres: Historical, Literature, German Literature, Novels, Germany, Roman, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Travel, Contemporary
ratings_count: 18007
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Exclusive Books Boeke Prize, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
category: Shortlist, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: PEN Translation Prize
category: Carol Brown Janeway, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Deutscher Buchpreis (German Book Prize)
category: Shortlist
publisher: Vintage