Measuring the World

Humboldt and Gauss are structured as photographic negatives of the same ambition: total, rational possession of the universe. Humboldt gets there by motion — climbing volcanoes, wading through piranha-infested rivers, subjecting his own body and his companions' to degrading, occasionally dangerous measurement, as though nothing has really happened to him until it's been converted into a number. Gauss gets there by sitting still, regarding travel as an indignity beneath pure mathematics and resenting every hour it costs him at his desk. Kehlmann's deadpan comedy comes from refusing to crown either method: Humboldt's empiricism produces real discovery and real farce in roughly equal measure, and Gauss's abstraction produces real genius alongside a marriage and a father-son relationship he's too impatient to actually attend to.

The running joke that cuts deepest is what total measurement costs the people standing next to the measurers — wives neglected, servants worked half to death, indigenous guides treated as instruments rather than informants, all in the name of Enlightenment knowledge that never quite gets around to noticing them as people. Kehlmann is gently mocking a very German, very period-specific faith that the world can be fully captured by rigor, whether the rigor of the sextant or the rigor of the proof, and showing that faith producing brilliance and cruelty from the same motion.

Kehlmann alternates the two men's chapters rather than braiding their stories together for most of the book, a structural choice that keeps them as parallel lines rather than a single plot — appropriate, since neither man particularly wants the other's company. Gauss's sections are acidic and impatient, full of irritation at lesser minds; Humboldt's are manic and slightly absurd, full of the sheer physical comedy of a man who cannot simply look at a cave without wanting to descend into it with instruments strapped to his back. The comic tone throughout is drier than either man's self-regard, which is the book's real joke. Kehlmann's prose, deliberately flat and free indirect, refuses to editorialize on either man's absurdity, trusting the reader to notice the gap between how seriously these geniuses take themselves and how minor most of their actual triumphs look once translated into ordinary human terms.