- Monday 6 October 2008
7.00pm start
Jennifer Rohn of Lablit.com presides over our monthly book club dedicated to great fiction books that feature science at their heart. Check this website for each month's selection, read the book beforehand and then drop into the RI to discuss it with other fiction lovers.
October's book
This month's selection is Measuring the world by Daniel Kehlmann:
Loosely based on the lives of 19th century explorer Alexander von Humboldt and a contemporary, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kehlmann's novel, a German bestseller widely heralded as an exemplar of ‘new' German fiction, injects musty history with shots of whimsy and irony. Humboldt voyages to South America to map the Orinoco River, climb the Chimborazo peak in Ecuador and measure ‘every river, every mountain and every lake in his path'. Gauss is the hedgehog to Humboldt's fox, leaping out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a formula and rarely leaving his hometown of Göttingen. The two meet at a scientific congress in 1828, when Germany is in turmoil after the fall of Napoleon. Other luminaries appear throughout the novel, including a senile Immanuel Kant, Louis Daguerre and Thomas Jefferson. The narrative is notable for its brisk pacing, lively prose and wry humour (curmudgeonly Gauss laments, for instance how ‘every idiot would be able to... invent the most complete nonsense' about him 200 years hence), which keenly complements Kehlmann's intelligent, if not especially deep, treatment of science, mathematics and reason at the end of the Enlightenment. (From Publisher's Weekly)
Admission is free and there is no need to book