There’s a meta moment in this book in which one of the two main characters complains to the other one about “novels that wandered off into lying fables because the author tied his fake inventions to the names of real historical personages”.  It is meta because this is a fictionalized biography of mathematician Carl Gauss and geographer Alexander von Humboldt.  They are both German, as is the author.  I don’t know how well known the de­tails of their lives are in Germany, but as the product of an anglo­phone education system, I knew virtually nothing about them.  I knew of Gauss, and I knew the story of how Gauss as a young boy had added up the numbers from one to a hundred in an instant, when the teacher had expected it to take the full class period⁠—I tell my students that story every term when they miss a question that could be solved via Gaussian summation.  But that was the sum total of my knowledge of his life, and though my under­standing is that he is considered a strong contender for history’s greatest mathematician, I don’t really know anything about his contributions to the field.  Meanwhile, of Humboldt I knew even less⁠—I might never have even heard his name were I not from California, where Humboldt County ranks fourteenth by area and thirty-fifth by population out of the fifty-eight counties in the state.  However, apparently during his lifetime he was one of the most famous people in the world, renowned for his exploration of South America in particular: he’d followed the Orinoco deep into the continent, climbed the Andes to an elevation higher than any European before him had ever reached, and made meticulous scientific observations during his travels, about which he wrote voluminously.  But Kehlmann has him predict that he would fall into relative obscurity, saying of his Orinoco journey that “he no longer believed that the future world would care, he also had doubts about the significance of the journey upriver itself. The channel didn’t produce any benefit for the continent, it was as abandoned and mosquito-ridden as ever”. 

Kehlmann portrays Gauss and Humboldt as embodiments of opposite stances toward science: Humboldt travels the world to collect data, climbing down into the caldera of a volcano to dis­prove the theory of “neptunism” and having himself tied to the bow of a ship for a full day to measure the heights of the waves.  Gauss, by contrast, believes that true science was done by “a man alone at his desk”.  (Humboldt points out that “the man at his desk would naturally need a nurturing wife to warm his feet and cook his food, along with numerous children to clean his instruments and parents who tended him like a baby”; Gauss agrees, but doesn’t see how this undermines his theory of rugged individualism.)  There are interesting little observations sprin­kled throughout, but this book’s real calling card is its applica­tion of a slightly gonzo style to the story of a couple of eccentric scientists of the early nineteenth century.  The wildest passages go to Humboldt the adventurer, of course, such as the one that gets surreal as as he and his sidekick Aimé Bonpland are afflicted with hypoxia at high altitude, but to give you an example of the book’s arch humor, here’s a sex scene from one of the Gauss chapters:

As he let his hand slide over her breasts to her stomach and then, he decided to dare it even though he felt he should apolo­gize, on further down, a sliver of moon appeared between the curtains, pale and watery, and he was ashamed to realize in this very moment he suddenly understood how to make approxi­mate corrections in mismeasurements of the trajectories of planets.  He wished he could jot it down, but now her hand was creeping down his back.  She had not imagined it was like this, she said with a mixture of fear and fascination, so full of life, as if there were a third creature with them.  He threw himself on her, felt her shock, paused for a moment, then she wound her legs around his body, but he apologized, got up, stumbled to the desk, dipped the pen, and without lighting a candle wrote sum of square of diff betw. obs’d and calc’d Min. 

After I finished this, I discovered that apparently it was the most successful novel to come out of Germany since Perfume by Pa­trick Süskind.  That book inspired the song “Scentless Appren­tice” by Nirvana.  I wonder what kind of song this book might inspire.  I guess it’d have to be math rock.

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