Daniel Kehlmann Books In Order

Measuring the World

The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. 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. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in G ttingen to prove that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. 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.

Me and Kaminski

From the internationally best selling author Daniel Kehlmann, a provocative and wickedly funny novel about two unpredictable men one an artist and the other a journalist, who together embark on an unexpected adventure with uproarious results.

Sebastian Zollner’s failure as a journalist is matched only by his personal failures: his girlfriend is moving in a new lover before Sebastian even knows he s been dumped. Searching for the break that will redeem him in the eyes of his peers, he heads off on a wild goose chase into the mountains to interview the eccentric, legendary painter Manuel Kaminski, with the hope of writing his biography.

Kaminski is going blind and is living in seclusion with his daughter. He could be working on his next masterpiece or easing into his final days, and his inconsistent career raises the question of whether he has been a fraud or a genius. His artistic reputation hinges on any number of factors but most prominently on a definitive biography. Enter Zollner who has no intention of writing a puff piece. He s out to dig dirt and to force Kaminski to confront the legacy of his work. But the secrets he uncovers will lead Kaminski, and Zollner himself, to places neither of them ever expected to go.

With edgy wit and intelligence, Daniel Kehlmann dives into the problems of what is truth in our celebrity crazed times and embraces the energy and humanity that lie beneath the pretensions of the art and journalistic worlds. A firecracker of a novel.

Fame

Imagine being famous. Being recognized on the street, adored by people who have never even met you, known the world over. Wouldn t that be great? But what if, one day, you got stuck in a country where celebrity means nothing, where no one spoke your language and you didn t speak theirs, where no one knew your face no book jackets, no TV and you had no way of calling home? How would your fame help you then? What if someone got hold of your cell phone? What if they spoke to your girlfriends, your agent, your director, and started making decisions for you? And worse, what if no one believed you were you anymore? When you saw a look alike acting your roles for you, what would you do? And what if one day you realized your magnum opus, like everything else you d ever written, was a total waste of time, empty nonsense? What would you do next? Would your audience of seven million people keep you going? Or would you lose the capacity to keep on doing it? Fame and facelessness, truth and deception, spin their way through all nine episodes of this captivating, wickedly funny, and perpetually surprising novel as paths cross and plots thicken, as characters become real people and real people morph into characters. The result is a dazzling tour de force by one of Europe’s finest young writers.