The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Hum-boldt, negotiates savanna and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to prove that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauss has hardly climbed out of his carriage before both men are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after Napoleon’s fall.

Already a huge best seller in Germany, Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene.

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international praise for the best-selling
Measuring the World


“Kehlmann’s books exude the provocative attraction of masters like Nabokov or Proust.”
–Stern

“Daniel Kehlmann is a consummate storyteller, assured in tone, with a masterful control over the story line . . . Ravishing.”
–Der Spiegel

“I haven’t laughed so hard reading a new German novel in a long time . . . This young author plays his fiction game with great refinement and sparkling wit. The plot is strong and its dialogue totally hilarious.”
–Frankfurter Rundschau

“An outstanding novel!”
–De Telegraaf

“Kehlmann is an amazing writer.”
–Vrij Nederland

“Measuring the World has proved to be nothing less than a literary sensation.”
–The Guardian

“Brilliant.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Possibly this fall’s The Name of the Rose.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer (fall fiction preview)

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Daniel Kehlmann was born in 1975 in Munich, the son of a director and an actress. He attended a Jesuit college in Vienna, traveled widely, and has won several awards for previous novels and short stories, most recently the 2005 Candide Award. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages, and Measuring the World became an instant best seller in several European countries. Kehlmann is spending the fall of 2006 as writer-in-residence at New York University’s Deutsches Haus. He lives in Vienna.

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