“F” is a lollapalooza of a family comedy, diabolically intricate in its layering of concurrent narratives and dryly hilarious at every mazelike turn. With his fourth novel, Kehlmann should rightfully shake off any perceived debt to white male writers dead or living, notwithstanding the Pynchon-redolent tease of his title. While utilizing the cautious architecture of a neophyte novelist, seesawing dutifully between its main characters, every page seemed to announce “Fresh mind at work.” A fanciful imagining of two pioneering 19th century Germans, aristocrat explorer Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician-astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, it was a pungently witty admixture of scientific minutiae, geopolitical satire, road-movie tropes and what-have-you. To be sure, “Measuring the World” merited the place it soon garnered at the top of European best-seller lists.
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