Humboldt and Gauss in the Streets of Havana

The German Culture Festival brought Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) once again to the streets of Havana, this time accompanied by his compatriot Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), known as the Prince of Math, one of the men who anticipated the course of non-Euclidian Geometry.

GERMAN NOVELIST Daniel Kehlmann.

The two learned men came hand in hand with the novel La medición del mundo (Measuring the World), a book that has become one of the most internationally resounding successes from that European country’s field of letters in this first decade of the new millennium. It was presented at the house named after the German naturalist, located in Old Havana’s historical area.

The novel, taking a meeting between Humboldt and Gauss, recreates the parallel lives of these men who lived in the same epoch, but the author takes good care not to offer a biographical version.

La medición del mundo, on the contrary, goes for the delusions and certainties of their intellectual and human concerns, for the nobility and misfortunes of the two men, and has an imaginative literary construction that takes the novelist close to the resources of Latin American magic realism.

It’s an enjoyable narration that includes, besides the main characters, others like a declining Emmanuel Kant, a Daguerre that nervously wants to capture a blurred picture, and a heretical and hedonistic Bompland, very different from the pale image usually given of Humboldt’s American adventure companion.

Daniel Kehlmann (Munich, 1975) studied philosophy and literature and lives in Vienna. His first novel was published when he was 22 years old. But it was Yo y Kaminski (Kaminski and I), published in 2003, that won him both the favor of critics and the public for the first time. His novel Ich und Kaminski (Yo y Kaminski, Barcelona, 2005), from 2003, gave him world fame. With La medición del mundo (2005) he has experienced the great leap forward.

"I wanted to write like a crazy historian", he said when asked what was true and what wasn’t in a story that, although it’s a tribute to memory and intelligence, contradicts the rigorous Cartesian codes of European rationalism.

The author has won the Kleist Prize, one of the most illustrious German awards, and was a finalist in the Deutscher Buchpreis (German Book Prize / PEDRO DE LA HOZ).