Die Vermessung der Welt

Towards the end of the 18th century, two young Germans set out to survey the world. One, Alexander von Humboldt, fights his way through jungle and steppe, travels the Orinoco, tastes poisons, counts head lice, crawls into holes in the ground, climbs volcanoes and meets sea monsters and man-eaters. The other, the mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, who cannot spend his life without women and yet jumps out of bed on the wedding night to write down a formula - he also proves at home in Göttingen that space bends. Old, famous and a little strange, they met in Berlin in 1828. But as soon as Gauss gets out of his carriage, they get entangled in the political turmoil in Germany after the fall of Napoleon. Daniel Kehlmann describes the lives of two geniuses, their longings and weaknesses, their balancing act between loneliness and love, ridicule and greatness, failure and success, with fantasy and a lot of humour - a philosophical adventure novel of rare power and brilliance.