Difficult Pleasures
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

European novels have special ways of being light. Plummy self-consciousness walks abroad in the daylight. Even Thomas Bernhard, whose books are never light, writes his tormented snaky prose with a license — to be difficult — that American authors might envy if they cared to.
A crowd-pleaser about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), who laid the foundation for number theory, and about Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the famous naturalist, therefore comes as a long-distance treat, like imported chocolate. Daniel Kehlmann, an Austrian who has published six books since his birth in 1975, tells the parallel stories of Gauss and of von Humboldt as if they were everymen, exemplary for the trouble they encounter while merely leading their lives. “Measuring the World” (Pantheon, 272 pages, $23) first appears to be a much slighter “Mason & Dixon,” a picaresque buddy movie in which the stooge waves his astrolabe at windmills. Superficially it also compares with Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pécuchet,” in which two men set out to programmatically investigate the nature of the world but succeed only in frustrating themselves.
Gauss and von Humboldt succeed at a whole lot more. Von Humboldt explores South America, discovers the Humboldt Current, and disproves the cold core model of the Earth. He reprises Aguirre’s route on the Orinoco River, but takes to it more like Benjamin Franklin than Klaus Kinski.
Gauss, meanwhile, stays home. Mr. Kehlmann deploys a big theme about different ways of gathering knowledge: exploration and fact-finding as opposed to armchair thinking. He implies a preference for the latter. At the end of von Humboldt’s journeys, when he is old and overly celebrated, having crossed Russia with a deafening retinue of Cossacks and returning home, feeling thwarted because all the interesting plants were trampled under hoof, he considers:
If he thought, for example, that they had been traveling for twenty-three weeks, that they’d covered fourteen thousand five hundred versts, visited six hundred and fifty-eight stopping points, and, he hesitated, used twelve thousand two hundred and twentyfour horses, then the chaos became graspable and one felt better. But as the first suburbs of Berlin flew past and Humboldt imagined Gauss at that very moment staring through his telescope at heavenly bodies, whose paths he could sum up in simple formulas, all of a sudden he could no longer have said which of them had traveled afar and which of them had always stayed at home.
“Measuring the World” lacks the satirical rigor of “Bouvard and Pécuchet” because, though comic, it satirizes nothing; indeed, it takes a sentimental view of science. A scientist, for Mr. Kehlmann, is a type of person who has chosen a certain way to see reality and meanwhile suffers something like hüzün, the Sufi sadness about the presumable gap between perception of God and God himself. Such a sorrow carries a powerful consolation: the sensation of profundity.
Not a rigorous book, perhaps, “Measuring the World” can be heartily recommended. It is a light book that makes you feel smart.
“The Mystery Guest” (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 120 pages, $18) by Grégoire Bouillier, is light in a different, finer way. Its narrator, a version of Mr. Bouillier himself, wants reality more jealously than any scientist, and he barely believes in it. “I felt as if I’d tapped in to the inner hilarity of things,” he says, at the beginning of his tale, when a specious coincidence threatens to shake up his life: His ex him calls him, after a four-year silence, on the day his favorite author, Michel Leiris, dies. He desperately tries to read something into these coincidences. Dismayed by his own seizing fluctuations, he declares that “it was as if I had no continuous inner life.” Later, when he has finally found a key — an interpretation with legs, one that will carry him out of his depression — he keeps his old mental pace:
. . . with every passing second I found new reasons for excitement, and just then everything around me glistened with new meaning and the pieces of the puzzle of my life seemed to fall magically into place, and I felt as though I were bursting, thousands of chips came clattering down in my head, and I actually heard them cascading down like coins in a slot machine, announcing that this was my lucky day: I’d hit the jackpot and life was a daring adventure.
Mr. Bouillier speaks in these clichés; they lend a joshing, unreliable register to his mental life and mirror the unreliability he finds in reality. Much of the pleasure of the book comes from imagining Lorin Stein’s work translating from the French; his English sounds smoothly demotic, but also somehow French. Even complicated dithering — “I saw her eyes on the verge of tears, I mean tears on the verge of her eyes” — convinces in this English.
“The Mystery Guest” opens and closes like a Paul Auster trap, but it gets some meat in among its clichés:
. . . opportunity wouldn’t call twice. It never does, I told myself, there will be no more mysterious invitations to endure and resist and live in the face of everything, and I was mistaken: after an evening drinking one beer after another by the light of a huge chandelier, the man who would become my publisher contracted with me to finish the text that I had just begun to write.
Texts don’t get much more self-conscious than that, but they also seldom italicize live so successfully; they’re rarely so debonair, at least over here.