As he did in his most recent book, “The Director”, Kehlmann built this novel around two real, fascinating, and quite unusual people, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and took them and us on a fast-paced, never dull, and amazing journey.  The result was this 2006 book, the best selling book in German in the last 40 years.

Both of von Humboldt and Gauss were polymaths making important discoveries and advancing their fields.  von Humboldt traveled extensively in South America collecting botanical and zoological specimens and establishing the foundations for ecology, geography, and meteorology.  Gauss was considered the greatest mathematician of his time making major contributions in number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and probability theory.  He was also an accomplished astronomer and physicist of renown.

Kehlmann does a deep dive into the characters and activities of the two men with alternating chapters dealing with Humboldt’s adventures in the Amazon and Gauss’s adventures with universities and hide-bound thinking in 19th C. Germany.  As he had done in “The Director”, the story occasionally drifts off into the surreal with tangents unmoored to the main story in time, place, or action, but always coming back to Humboldt and Gauss who appear together in both the first and last chapter before flashbacks take us to their earlier years.

Why was this tale of two brilliant men from more than 200 years ago, men who didn’t rule nations or triumph in wars, so captivating and hard to put down?  To begin with, Kehlmann writes with great skill and seemingly at breakneck speed.  His eye for details and description is superb.  Then there’s also the fact that these two scientists were fascinating in their own right. Finally, the stories of Gottingen where Gauss was a professor and Berlin where Humboldt University sits next to some of the world’s greatest museums as well as the site of the Nazi book burning in 1933 were made more interesting by our being on those sites while I was reading the book.

Bottom line is that this is a wonderful book about fascinating characters who lived at a time of great upheaval and change.  Great combination and brilliantly written about by Daniel Kehlmann.