The brilliant debut novel by the author of The Director portrays the comic collision of two radically different Enlightenment geniuses--one who explored the world in person, and the other who pushed the boundaries of the universe in his own head.

"Kehlmann's lightly surreal style [is] a mixture of comedy, romance, and the macabre, with flashes of magical realism that read like Borges in the Black Forest."--The Washington Post Book World

"Addictively readable and genuinely and deeply funny." --Los Angeles Times

Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in 1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the post-Napolean world.