Germany’s surprise bestseller

By Sarah on July 19, 2006 10:53 AM

A book about the relationship between two old men – specifically, astronomer and mathematician Carl Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, journeyer through jungles – hardly seems like bestseller material. But take historical figures, add a dash of magical realism and Germany’s upheaval in post-Napoleonic time and what you get is a book that’s been on the country’s bestseller lists since its release last fall. In other words, MEASURING THE WORLD is the most successful German novel since Patrick Susskind‘s Perfume two decades ago.

How did this happen? Part of it was 31 year old Daniel Kehlmann‘s desire to emulate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “I wanted to write a Latin American novel,” he said to the Guardian, “But I’m not from Latin America. I can’t write like MÃ¡rquez, who has a beautiful woman putting the washing on the line and suddenly being caught up by the wind and flying away,” says Kehlmann, who lives in Vienna but is currently staying in Strasbourg. “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.”

It’s only recently, Kehlmann believes, that Germans are getting over their aversion to low culture and belief that weighty tomes count as literature. “Germany has yet to catch up,’ he says. “If you look the same thing happened with the 18th-century novel. In the 18th century if you wanted to be highly regarded you had to write verse epics. Novels were low-rate entertainment. The novel became an art form and nobody wrote verse epics any more.”

The good news is that this novel – Kehlmann’s sixth – will be available in English soon. Translated by Carol Janeway, Pantheon publishes it here in November 2006 while Quercus picks it up in early 2007.