Measuring the World (2006)

In 1828, mathematician Carl Freidrich Gauss went to a conference in Berlin, as a guest of Alexander von Humboldt, naturalist and explorer. It is from this meeting — the two shared only their status as Enlightenment icons and an obsessive need to find order in chaos — that Daniel Kehlmann spins his elegant comic novel Measuring the World. Eschewing the oppressive morality that defines modern German literature (see: Grass, Gunther and Böll, Heinrich), the 31-year-old author forges a sly prose style shaped by the fire of human nature and the anvil of logic: It's magic realism honed to a distinctly Teutonic level of precision.