(Pantheon Books, $23)
In 2006, a 32-year-old German novelist who has been likened to Nabokov, Proust and García Márquez outsold, in Germany, books by JK Rowling and Dan Brown. At first sight, Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt) looks like a perfect example of cerebral German Hochkultur. From a British perspective, it is hard to understand how a novel about two real 18th-century scientists—the physician and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss—can be in the bestseller charts for 71 weeks, hogging the top spot for 37 weeks, and selling more than 1m copies in hardback.
But there is an easy answer to the phenomenon of Daniel Kehlmann. The German public has traditionally reserved a special place for "geniuses"—a notion developed by Kant and championed by the Romantics. And Measuring the World is a book about two geniuses, penned by a potential third.
Anecdote has it that Carl Friedrich Gauss started correcting his father's calculations in 1780, aged three. At 16 he developed—though didn't publish—an alternative to Euclidean geometry, effectively pre-figuring Einstein's theory of relativity. Aged 19 he discovered the construction of the heptadecagon. He went on to make ground-breaking contributions to number theory, corrected the outdated mathematics of orbital prediction and collaborated with the physicist Wilhelm Weber on pioneering studies into magnetism. Until the introduction of the euro, his calculating gaze adorned German ten-mark notes.
Alexander von Humboldt was born in 1769, younger brother to the equally prodigious philosopher, linguist, politician and educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt. Taking to the natural sciences rather than the arts, Alexander produced treatises on mineralogy, botanical geography, muscular irritation and electric eels. On his travels to South America, he discovered an unknown channel between the Orinoco and the Amazon. Charles Darwin and Edgar Allen Poe both admired his work; 17 species of animal, 12 types of plant and more than 20 places across the globe are named after him.
Born in Munich in 1975, Daniel Kehlmann moved to Vienna aged six, where he went on to study literature and philosophy at university. A favourite with his professors, he took up a teaching position aged 22, while embarking on a PhD on the Kantian sublime. Fellow students remember Kehlmann as extremely bright but aloof. Enormously productive, his bibliography puts other writers of his age to shame: Measuring the World is his sixth book, and a collection of essays has already followed.
The novel starts with a snapshot, literally: Louis Daguerre takes a picture of the first meeting between the two scientists at a conference in Berlin in 1828. Gauss moves; the picture is blurred; Kehlmann unwinds the film and narrates the men's stories in alternating shots. While Humboldt roams the globe, measuring and collecting data with Prussian discipline, Gauss only reluctantly leaves his native Göttingen, calculating the flow of things around him in his head. To understand the fundamental restlessness of nature, Kehlmann's Gauss says, "one didn't need to clamber up mountains or torment oneself in the jungle."
With its focus on scientific investigation and its blend of fiction and fact, Measuring the World is a work of a distinct type that has long been popular in Germany. Allgemeinbildung, a general competence in both arts and science, has been an ideal for writers since Goethe, who wrote on plant metamorphosis and the science of colour; it was Alexander's brother Wilhelm who extended the Kantian ideal of genius to include scientists as well as artists. Measuring the World confirms the enlightened rather than the monstrous self-image of Germany—a humane nation of Dichter und Denker, thinkers and poets.
It also confirms that Kehlmann's long-standing relationship with genius is actually rather troubled. In his earlier novels, one finds many child prodigies with promising names. Arthur Beerholm in Beerholms Vorstellung (Beerholm's Imagination) is a "12-year-old Platonist"; the physician David Mahler in Mahlers Zeit (Mahler's Time) believes he has found a way to slow down time. But both are comically inept at presenting their ideas. They muddle their words, turn red, knock over glasses of water: scientific genius equals social incompetence.
Ich und Kaminski ("I and Kaminski"), Measuring the World's predecessor, also reveals Kehlmann's discomfort with the notion of extraordinary talent. It tells the story of Sebastian Zöllner, an arrogant, self-important and incompetent arts journalist who is trying to write a biography of the "great" surrealist painter Manuel Kaminski. Despite being blind and senile, Kaminski is more in control of the situation than Zöllner, although both are thoroughly dislikeable. Ich und Kaminski isn't written in the hagiographic mode: it's a vicious satire on the media and the culture industry which out-deadpans any contemporary English-language—except, perhaps, Kurt Vonnegut.
In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in February 2006, Kehlmann hinted that Ich und Kaminski had been his own eureka moment. The novel, he said, "was a very aggressive satire of the world of media and journalism, and then I saw that journalists and media people loved it." The secret of Measuring the World's success, too, lies in the fact that it is an aggressive satire, this time on Germanic high seriousness. Immanuel Kant—the subject of Kehlmann's abandoned dissertation—is dispatched as early as chapter five. Gauss visits his idol on his deathbed in Königsberg: "He needed the opinion of the only other man who wouldn't think he was mad, and would definitely understand him. The man who had taught the world more about space and time than any other human being. He crouched down, so that his face was level with the little man's. He waited. The little eyes looked at him.
'Sausage,' said Kant."
And just as Kehlmann enjoys cutting the nation's intellectual giant down to size, he takes pleasure putting Baron Humboldt's achievements into perspective. One of the novel's highlights is the chapter on Humboldt's attempt to scale the peak of Ecuador's Chimborazo. With the baron and his assistant Bonpland hallucinating and vomiting, it recalls the burlesque double act of Cervantes's Don Quixote rather than the earnest inwardness of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain.
A recent article in the Guardian suggested that Kehlmann's success marks the birth of magical realism in Germany. This is clearly a mistake: Günter Grass, with his never-ageing drummer boy and talking animals, flirted with the genre as early as the late 1950s. Kehlmann is, in truth, less of a magical realist than an ironist; where he uses elements of magic and fantasy, it is to show up the shortcomings of German rationalism. Coming in the year in which Germany takes up the presidency of both the EU and the G8, this is no bad thing.
