(http://www.new-books-in-german.com/129002/Uploaded/editor%7C08spr_Daniel-Kehlmann.jpg)
This is a novel about the two German 19th century scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Gauss.
I very much like what the New York Times wrote about that book in a review:
"The novel opens with the scientists’ meeting in 1828 (when Humboldt is 59 and Gauss is 51) and then flashes back to their independent lives told chronologically in alternating chapters. Humboldt leaves Prussia, lowers himself into volcanoes, explores the Amazon and scales the highest peak in South America to take his physical measurements. Gauss stays home in Göttingen, thinks his way into exotic mathematical realms and imagines space as curved. Two-thirds into the book, Kehlmann is back up to 1828. He narrates four chapters about his characters together in Berlin and then again physically separates them, though they are much on each other’s minds until the end of their lives and the novel. Gauss believed parallel lines meet. Think of Kehlmann’s method as a parallax by which we can lucidly observe alternate forms of measuring the world, including his own fictional form.
The Humboldt chapters — with their physical dangers, odd flora, and cameos by notables like Goethe and Jefferson — supply much of the narrative excitement. Portraying a stay-at-home mathematician’s mind is more challenging, but Kehlmann provides just enough geometry and physics to represent Gauss’s inventive rigor and odd foresight without losing barely numerate readers. By treating the two men together, Kehlmann not only contrasts the inductive and deductive, the experimental and the imaginative, but also shows how these methods are connected to very different though occasionally similar sensibilities. Humboldt is ecstatic when his mother dies, allowing him to leave Prussia. Gauss’s mother lives with him for the last 22 years of her life. Swashbuckling adventurer Humboldt seems asexual. Pure mathematician Gauss is obsessed with women. His troubles with two wives and sets of children rival Humboldt’s problems with colonials and natives. Humboldt is eternally optimistic about social progress. Gauss looks at the stars and sees entropy.
Although Humboldt and Gauss were extremely ambitious and highly serious, Kehlmann often presents them humorously. Gauss’s physical complaints and atrocious manners are continually amusing. Humboldt’s resistance to women and unwitting insults to others are equally funny. The scientists’ dialogues with lesser intelligences — and even with each other — often sound like the non sequiturs in “Waiting for Godot.” Kehlmann gives ample credit to his characters’ discoveries — they were two of the most renowned scientists of their time — but his treatment humanizes their authoritarian public personas. Kehlmann includes Gauss’s confusion about statistics and his attraction to spiritualism, and he suggests that Humboldt may have exaggerated several of his exploits. With these not-so-distant mirror characters, Kehlmann usefully reminds us that our own universal geniuses and vaunted measurements of the world will be superseded — and will look comic to people in the next century."
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/books/review/LeClair.t.html)
I absolutely love this book!
I found it in January 2008 in a little bookstore in Berlin (located next to the "Literaturcafé"). But I didn't start to read it immediately.
I worked on this quilt mostly in Berlin in spring 2008 when I had a small apartment in Berlin Kreuzberg, but also in Chicago over Easter 2008 and back home in Dortmund, Germany. I finished it in February 2009. The process was very interesting for me: I worked on that quilt first without seeing a connection to the book. I just used nice fabrics, a certain pattern, or no pattern at all... But after I started reading the story, the parts of my quilt grew together in a special way and I added some elements on purpose. In the end I thought that my searching for a way to arrange my different quilt parts mirrored what Humboldt felt in the story: that "the chaos became graspable and one felt better." :-)
Now, when you look at my quilt on "Measuring the World", maybe:
- the fabrics with flowers remind you of the drawings made by Humboldt and Bonpland?
- the circles and stars you possibly detect in the pattern remind you of Gauss, also the parallel (and not so parallel) lines I used to quilt the mid section?
- this quilt seems to be incomplete, there are gaps ...as there are when we ask questions and don't find the answers? We try to construct a pattern, but then we are not sure...?
I added a line from the book and fixed it on the back of my quilt:
"Humboldt protested: he knew nothing, but he had spent his whole life trying to change this, he had aquired some knowledge and traveled the world, but that was all."
