Measuring the World
Kehlmann has the contemporary novelist's fascination with territorial politics and the poetics of space (...) Measuring the World's power is all the more acute because it harnesses to this spatial turn the sense of history in process which is key to the best historical novels.
That was Giles Foden reviewing Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World. The review itself spends more words on the actual story of novel than on giving us an idea of the style, the quality and the issues with the writing, for which we could rely on Tom LeClair's review in The New York Times
Kehlmann is a little self-conscious about playing with history and authority. He has Humboldt complain about “novels that wandered off into lying fables because the author tied his fake inventions to the names of real historical personages.” “Disgusting,” agrees Gauss. An admirer of magic realism, Kehlmann takes some liberties with biography. His portrait of Gauss’s son Eugen as a dunderhead, for example, (...)
More problematic than “lying fables” is this novel’s slim size. While one might not want Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” to be a page longer than its 773, “Measuring the World” can’t calibrate with much robustness or precision two lengthy and rich lives in its 259 pages. The personal histories and published works of Kehlmann’s subjects were extremely messy. “Measuring the World” is elegant and measured in design and expression.
Yet another review by Ron Charles at Washington Post.
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