Meet to discuss works from contemporary German-speaking authors in our Goethe Book Club hosted by Chris Walker. Each selection can be read in its English translation or original German; the discussion will be in English.
Daniel Kehlmann: Measuring the World (2007)
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.
Daniel Kehlmann’s works have won the Candide Prize, the Hölderlin Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. He was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2016–17.
Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages.
“
A masterfully realized, wonderfully entertaining and deeply satisfying novel... Addictively readable and genuinely and deeply funny.”
—Los Angeles Times
Summary:
© From Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann published by Vintage. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. ©2007
Event series Goethe Book Club 2020
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