Daniel Kehlmann

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Measuring the World

Translated by Carol Brown Janeway

Two Enlightenment-influenced thinkers, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, are fictionalized in this novel translated from German. Both thinkers are obsessed with measuring things in the world, but whereas Humboldt climbs volcanoes and journeys down the Orinoco River, Gauss hibernates in his observatory recording movements of the planets. Both men are emotionally stunted and repressed. The novel investigates false dichotomies of poet versus scientist and experience versus abstraction, and it makes important commentary on Western culture’s tendency to quantify and segment experience—to “measure the world.”

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Tyll

Translated by Ross Benjamin

Tyll, the eponymous trickster protagonist of this novel translated from German, finds himself in amazing and weird circumstances arising from an alternate history of the Thirty Years’ War. The brutality of life in dystopian war-ravaged Europe in the 1600’s, much of it thrust upon the common people by power-hungry political elites, is on full display—Tyll witnesses witchcraft, murder, plague, violence, famine, and more. The novel’s language and storytelling style are magic, but perhaps its biggest takeaway is that trauma must have left an indelible mark on the psyches of seventeenth-century Europeans and their descendents.