...a dazzling success ... fantastically imagined...
there's an energy and enthusiasm about this book that is so refreshing and true to the spirit of the time in which Humboldt and Gauss lived (
Daily Telegraph)
Measuring the World has proved nothing less than a literary sensation... the novel has sold more than 600,000 copies in Germany, knocking J K Rowling and Dan Brown off the bestseller lists... it is the most successful German novel since Patrick Suskind's Perfume... 31-year-old Daniel Kehlmann is a literary wunderkind already being compared to Nabokov and Proust'
(
Guardian)
The novel belies the German reputation for humourlessness and the author very much plays it for laughs without demeaning his protagonists. What he conveys so well is the presence of two extraordinary personalities...
It is a delightful read (
Literary Review)
'Kehlmann brings to life the intellectual world both men inhabit with a dazzling combination of wry humour and humane observation... Kehlmann doesn't just illuminate the lives of these two men,
he captures the wondrous nature of the universe through the prism of uncompromising intellectual ideas' (
Metro)
'A historical novel that handles facts with the delight of a wide-eyed child handling exaggerated fictions. With
a boundless sense of fun and an impressive command of his subject, he explores scientific and metaphorical ideas of opposites, parallels and distances, and wonders - against the backdrop of the universe - what their ultimate significance could be ....
A deceptively clever novel - understated and boldly ambitious in its scope' (
Observer)
Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World announces the arrival of a new generation...
Kehlmann is a master of irony ... already a figure of European stature...(he) has it in him to be the great German novelist that the world had given up waiting for (
Sunday Telegraph)
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Vienna, Berlin and New York. He has published six novels: Measuring the World, Me & Kaminski Fame, F and You Should Have Left and has won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Doderer Prize, The Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature.