Germans and humor in the same book

DO you think that Franz Joseph Haydn is an ideal musical companion? Are you soothed by his sunny conviction that reason really does matter or are you buoyed, perhaps, by his unself-conscious assumption that the sublime and a great good humor can coexist harmoniously?

If so, then Daniel Kehlmann’s rather stunningly assured “Measuring the World” is just the novel for you.

At 31, the author -- an Austrian, though born in Munich -- is literally the wunderkind of contemporary German letters. “Measuring the World,” the first of his books to appear in English, is his fourth novel. The first, which won a major literary prize, appeared while he still was an undergraduate, reading German literature and philosophy at a Jesuit university in Vienna. He also has published a book of short stories and a collection of essays.

At home, “Measuring the World” was Kehlmann’s breakthrough book, spending nearly a year on Germany’s bestseller lists. More Germans have bought this novel than any other German-language novel in the last two decades. It tells you something about both the globalization of popular culture and the realities of the vaunted German seriousness that two of the titles it displaced at the top of that bestseller list were translations of J.K. Rowling’s most recent “Harry Potter” novel and Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code.”

Kehlmann is foremost among an emerging generation of young German writers who have set out to overturn the self-conscious -- though not entirely unnecessary -- pieties that made their country’s postwar literature synonymous with worthy, weighty and, not infrequently, dull. Even before the recent revelations concerning Gunter Grass’ convenient personal reticence, Kehlmann had made the Nobel laureate and his left-wing associates in the influential Group 47 a particular target, criticizing them for promoting a “morose” literature at once provincial and removed from its audience.

In the context of that literary quarrel, “Measuring the World” is a devastating salvo because it is, by subject, a quintessentially German novel -- historically conscious, philosophically erudite.

It unfolds, however, as something entirely new, something that is addictively readable and genuinely and deeply funny.

Keep that in mind because, at first blush, Kehlmann’s subject and characters may seem a little daunting. He sets his novel in the early 19th century, the age of German classicism. His protagonists are the great scientific explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt and the legendary mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. By 1828, both are elderly, eminent and wildly eccentric when they meet at a scientific congress in Berlin. As this unlikely pair becomes enmeshed in the politics of post-Napoleonic Germany, their histories unfold in a series of reveries centered on their triumphs. Humboldt recalls his epic exploration of Venezuela’s Orinoco River; Gauss his mathematical explorations of the universe and landmark discovery that space curves. There is a rich cast of supporting characters, including a senile Immanuel Kant (the philosopher was the subject of Kehlmann’s dissertation), Gauss’ superficially hapless son, Eugen ... and an extraterrestrial spaceship.

Toto, I don’t think we’re in Weimar anymore.

As men of the enlightenment, Humboldt and Gauss believed deeply that both this world and, indeed, the universe in which it is situated are entirely knowable, that is, measurable things. The restless Humboldt pursued knowledge through audacious physical journeys, the rooted Gauss through hermetic explorations that involved running prime numbers in his head. Part of what makes this novel so engaging is the clarity with which Kehlmann discerns the symmetry between their quests and the deeply comedic possibilities of their very human absurdities. Here, in Carol Brown Janeway’s wonderfully lucid translation, is the geographer, having just lectured his companion on how humorous Prussians really are, stalled on the banks of the Orinoco:

“After some hours, Humboldt discovered that fleas had buried themselves in the skin of his toes. They had to interrupt the journey; Bonpland classified plants, Humboldt sat in a camp chair, his feet in a bucket of vinegar, and mapped the course of the river. Pulex penetrans, the common sand flea. He would describe it, but nowhere in his diary was he going to mention that he himself had fallen victim to it.

“ ‘It’s not that bad,’ said Bonpland.

“Humboldt said he’d thought a lot about the rules of fame. If it was known that a man had had fleas living underneath his toenails, nobody would take him seriously. No matter what his achievements had been.”

Here is Gauss, miserable at having to leave his home for the first time in two years to attend the Berlin conference, tormenting his son as they jostle along in their coach:

“The journey was a torture. He called Eugen a failure.... For a time, he stared out of the window, a frown on his face, then asked when his daughter was finally going to get married. Why didn’t anyone want her, what was the problem?

“Eugen pushed back his long hair, kneaded his red cap with both hands, and didn’t want to answer.

“ ‘Out with it,’ said Gauss.

“To be honest, said Eugen, his sister wasn’t exactly pretty.

“Gauss nodded; the answer seemed a plausible one. He said he wanted a book.”

Last summer, Kehlmann told an interviewer that he approached “Measuring the World” intending something in the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “I wanted to write a Latin American novel. But I’m not from Latin America. I can’t write like Marquez, who has a beautiful woman putting washing on the line and suddenly being caught up in the wind and flying away. But I could have the Latin American atmosphere and playfulness and absurdity, and anything could happen. I’ve written a Latin American novel about Germans and German classicism.”

German classicism reached its apogee with Schiller and Goethe, and its distinctive contribution to the European enlightenment was its belief that aesthetics was not just a catalog of sensation but a path to knowledge. German classicism sought the harmonious reconciliation of opposites in an era of wrenching political and social turbulence. Yet lurking behind their project -- especially for Goethe -- was the tragic but enriching suspicion that the lost wholeness they saw in Athenian and Roman models might be lost beyond recovery.

Kehlmann has spoken often of his antipathy toward conventional notions of high and low aesthetics and of his regard for popular culture. He admires “The Simpsons,” for example, and has described “The Sopranos” as “a modern realist novel that isn’t expressed as a novel. It’s like modern Balzac.”

“Measuring the World” is a masterfully realized, wonderfully entertaining and deeply satisfying novel. Given the author’s aspirations, it’s a compliment to say that he’s achieved precisely what the German classicist Johann Joachim Winckelmann had in mind when he urged his countrymen to pursue an art that was “inimitable through imitation.”

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