![]() Untitled photograph from the series Radici © Fabrizio Albertini One of the mordant jokes of this clever, exquisitely terrifying slip of a book: On the internet, nobody knows you’re a ghost. Such is the conundrum raised in Daniel Kehlmann’s novel, YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT (Pantheon, $18), translated from the German by Ross Benjamin, when the narrator, his wife, Susanna, and their four-year-old daughter, Esther, take up residence in a mountaintop getaway rented from a mysterious landlord through Airbnb. In this case the most pressing problem would seem to be not sanity but location - how to find your place in a new mental geography. ![]() Gauss has hardly climbed out of his carriage before both men are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after Napoleon's fall.Already a huge best seller in Germany, Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene.From the Hardcover edition.If you were losing your mind, how would you know? What if instead it were the world that was losing its mind - flouting the usual statutes re: time and space? At what point would you look into a darkened window and, failing to see your reflection, say, “It’s not me, it’s you”? Maybe you’d say nothing at all, given that the customary divisions between me and you, mind and matter, had gone null and void, were no longer relevant, had most definitively ceased to apply. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in Gottingen to prove that space is curved. One of them, the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Hum-boldt, negotiates savanna and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. ![]() ![]() Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. ![]() The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment. ![]()
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