The Prospect Reading Group met this month to discuss Measuring the World, by the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. I wasn’t able to attend the meeting due to illness but a report was compiled by group member Caroline Ballinger, including observations from those present and a few of my own.
Measuring the World is an imagined account of the lives of two German scientific giants of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, structured around a (real? potential?) meeting between the two men later in life. The book was a literary sensation in Germany itself, and had good reviews in the UK, including in this magazine. The book was chosen following a discussion by the reading group about whether there were novels coming out of Europe as ambitious as some noteworthy examples from the US, in asking the big questions and linking the private and public spheres.
Our reading group had an interesting but rather unenthusiastic discussion about the book: interesting because of the subject matter, but unenthusiastic because of doubts about the work as a piece of writing. The most important complaint was that Kehlmann fails to make the science come alive, so that it is difficult for non-scientists to grasp the significance of the breakthroughs made by these two men. There were also questions as to whether the narrative structure – in which alternating chapters follow the careers of each man – was entirely successful, and a sense that the Humboldt sections worked better than those on Gauss.
What holds it together is the author’s ironic humour and the vivid descriptions of Humboldt’s travels to South America, which had a ‘Heart of Darkness’ feeling at times. There is also an interest in the emotional detachment of the main characters, who take to extremes the championing of the scientific and rational over the emotional, and Humboldt’s obsessive attempts to impose order on a chaotic world. There is ambivalence here: Gauss’s son Eugen loves poetry, but is also susceptible to political romanticism which can lead to extremism. Kehlmann shows sly self-awareness when he has Gauss muttering darkly about the modern fancy for fictional stories about real people.
A darker side of Prussian emotional repression emerges in a scene towards the end of the book in which the leader of the Gymnastics movement, an early expression of militant German nationalism, delivers a rant on the nation’s humiliations. One imagines that for German readers, Kehlmann’s book offers a subtle, witty examination of what it is to be German. But he also offers a view on the vagaries of power from a wider slant. In the period in which the novel is set, the United States is a newly independent nation looking with concern at the antics of powerful Spain to its south. Thomas Jefferson queries Humboldt about Spanish rule: “If one had a great power for a neighbour, one could never have enough information.”
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