Measuring the World

This novel by Daniel Kehlmann can take its place beside historical fictions like The Way to Paradise and The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa. Although lighter in tone than those works, Measuring the World is, like them, packed with ideas and sharply drawn characters. Kehlmann even skillfully carries off the technique that Vargas Llosa has perfected of interweaving plot strands in the same paragraph. The reader will believe he is consulting a colorful historical account of the two scientists involved, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, rather than a novel.