Doesn't measure up

Can't say I'm really sure why there's such a hoo-ha about Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World, now published over here by Quercus.

Based loosely on the lives of early 19th Century Germans, the explorer Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, it's been a massive success in Germany, sitting upon the bestseller list like a fat, unmovable burgermeister for ages, shifting about a million copies in hardback. The critics, too, lapped it up. Hailing it as a new sort of German novel, wry, with touches of irony, full of clever po-mo asides.

But I didn't find it wry, ironic and the po-mo asides grated. For instance Gauss says, "any idiot...can make up the most complete nonsense" about him in 200 years. Hey, get it? The author is commenting on how it's actually himself making up nonsense about Gauss. Oh, what delicious wry, po-mo irony! Or would have been about 20 years ago when that was fresh. Now, every damn graduate of the Iowa or East Anglia programmes who thinks he/she is the second coming of Dave Eggers is pulling that shit.

Good on the Germans for getting their irony schwerve on. But we here don't have to think it's fresh or funny.