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Adventurous minds Measuring the World
Although the two chief protagonists—Alexander von Humboldt, a naturalist and explorer, and Carl Friedrich Gauss, a mathematician and astronomer—were post-Enlightenment scientists, Kehlmann’s new take on both of them is original and inspiring: in his plot, they want to measure the size of the world. Thus, chronometers, sextants, thermometers, cyanometers, barometers, heliotropes and other 19th-century instruments of measurement are part of the enterprise. These two idiosyncratic scholars meet each other at a conference in Berlin in 1828, immediately after the fall of Napoleon. Kehlmann humour and light comedy blows away the cobwebs of German obsession with stories about World War II. His writing dispenses the (mis)conception that Germans are stuffy and serious. Kehlmann confesses that he wanted to write "a Latin American novel," something that Marquez could have done with panache and irreverence had he been born in Germany. That is why the story is placed a hundred years or so before Nazism, one of Germany’s other fixations. Its milieu becomes the Age of Enlightenment, which is comparatively an agreeable time to live in. When the two men meet at the end of the first chapter, their best work is already behind them. Through the rest of the book, Kehlmann goes back and forth in time in his witty, conversational style to fill in the details of their dusty pasts that includes brief appearances of Goethe, Schiller and Kant, to produce an exciting, juicy novel. When the two finally engage in conversation towards the end, they are at odds about everything. Humboldt has his eyes half closed and Gauss regards him as an antediluvian ass. What brings out the wit of the story is the placement of the two men before the "age of science," a time when chemistry was better known as alchemy and astrology was yet to pave the way for astronomy. Scientific precision was still elusive and scientific facts untested. Gauss’s flirtation with the magnetic needle convinces him that he alone is the "magus from the dark ages." Gauss is a "Prince of Mathematics" who has written extensively even before the age of 21 on the number theory which rivals Newton’s Principia. His deductive logic is nonpareiled in that he creates theories about combustion by simply walking momentarily around a candle-lit room. His first trip on a gas balloon affirms his conviction, which contradicts Euclid, that all parallel lines must meet and, of course, that space is folded and bent. It takes him minutes to deduce what others take a lifetime to reason. He can predict the fall of the German monarchy with equal foresight and felicity. Tragically, he is born at a time that has not witnessed anaesthetic surgery, air travel or space-based telescopes even as he knows that they will be invented shortly. Humboldt is as fond of travelling as Gauss is disgusted by it. If Gauss is tetchy and irritable, Humboldt is dreamy and idealistic. His method is empirical during his travels to Central and South America from 1799 to 1804: he wants to feel the sting of electric eels to make accurate documentation, drink poison to discover its lethal quality, investigate every hole in the ground, find the source of every river or scale the highest mountain on earth. "Whenever things were frightening," he writes, "it was a good idea to measure them." A quixotic character, Humboldt possesses the single-mindedness of an oyster and courts great risks to get results. In order to get used to pain, for instance, he ties up one of his hands behind his back for days, and later on has himself lowered into a volcano’s mouth by a rope. Once, he even straps himself to the mast of a ship to measure the height of waves. Although in writing them into fiction as quirky characters, Kehlmann art frequently begins to resemble caricature, especially when he has Gauss leap out of his wedding bed to write down an equation, the book is glitzy and delightful if read with an open mind. Measuring the World is indeed both a celebration of enlightenment history as well as well as its comic expos as Kehlmann ropes in two giants of this time and treats their lives with audacity and irony.
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Measuring
the World