Measuring the World

副标题: A Novel

ISBN: 9780375424465

出版社: Pantheon

出版年: 2006-11-7

页数: 259

定价: USD 23.00

装帧: Hardcover

内容简介

Loosely based on the lives of 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt and a contemporary, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kehlmann's novel, a German bestseller widely heralded as an exemplar of "new" German fiction, injects musty history with shots of whimsy and irony. Humboldt voyages to South America to map the Orinoco River, climb the Chimborazo peak in Ecuador and measure "every river, every mountain and every lake in his path." Gauss is the hedgehog to Humboldt's fox, leaping out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a formula and rarely leaving his hometown of G?ttingen. The two meet at a scientific congress in 1828, when Germany is in turmoil after the fall of Napoleon. Other luminaries appear throughout the novel, including a senile Immanuel Kant, Louis Daguerre and Thomas Jefferson. The narrative is notable for its brisk pacing, lively prose and wry humor (curmudgeonly Gauss laments, for instance, how "every idiot would be able to... invent the most complete nonsense" about him 200 years hence), which keenly complements Kehlmann's intelligent, if not especially deep, treatment of science, mathematics and reason at the end of the Enlightenment.

作者简介

丹尼尔? 凯曼（Daniel Kehlmann）

德国当代作家，评论家。1975年出生于慕尼黑。后考入维也纳大学，攻读哲学与德国文学。

1997年出版第一本小说《贝尔宏姆的想象》。2003年，小说《我与康明斯基》为他赢得世界声誉。2005年，刚满30岁的他出版《丈量世界》，被译为40多种语言，销量突破200万册，被誉为二战后德语文学最伟大的成就之一。2008年获托马斯?曼奖。

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