![]() ![]() By the time they come to climb Mount Chimborazo in the Andes, recounted in a side-splittingly funny chapter, Bonpland "was already free of fever, and even the dreams, in which he strangled, dismembered, shot, burned, poisoned or buried Baron Humboldt under stones, were becoming less frequent". Kehlmann reprises some of their conversations in tight moments, of which there were many. Yet Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt ( Measuring the World) was precisely that. The long-suffering Bonpland, by and large overlooked by posterity (with only a lunar crater named after him), seems to have been the perfect foil for Humboldt, being diffident and sensitive. Non-Euclidean geometry, number theory, and the eighteenth-century geological cult of Neptunism these and other scientific obscurities scarcely seem to be the stuff of a novel destined to be a global hit. ![]() Whereas Gauss enjoys mutually loving relationships with his mother and first wife, Humboldt has neither Kehlmann pokes a little fun at Humboldt's apparent homosexuality, painting him as a prude who forbids his travelling companion, the botanist Aime Bonpland, any liaisons with local women. The Berlin vignette establishes a slender connection between the two men the next chapters explore, alternately, the main events of their lives, from childhood on. ![]()
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