Different shades of exploration

NEW RELEASES

Measuring the World
Daniel Kehlmann (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)
Quercus
272 pages
Rs 395

Towards the end of the eighteenth century in the heyday of the German Enlightenment, two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world.

The naturalist and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat schooled for greatness, negotiates savannah and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, climbs the highest mountain then known to man, counts lice on the heads of the natives, and explores every hole in the ground.

The mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss, a man born in poverty who will be recognized as the greatest mathematician since Newton, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to know that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head, cannot imagine a life without women and yet jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula.

Measuring the World is a novel of rare charm and readability, distinguished by sly humour and fine characterization. It brings the two eccentric geniuses to life, their longings and their weaknesses, their balancing act between loneliness and love, absurdity and greatness, failure and success.

Arlington Park
Rachel Cusk
Faber and Faber
320 pages
Rs 250

Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life.

Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference.

For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them.

Theirs is a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents.

Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is one of her most assured, and full of compassion and wit. She writes about her characters' domestic lives, their private thoughts and fears with intelligence and insight.

The Saffron Kitchen
Yasmin Crowther
Abacus
288 pages
Rs 295

On an autumn day in London, the dark secrets and troubled past of Maryam Mazar surface violently with tragic consequences for her pregnant daughter, Sara, and her newly orphaned nephew, Saeed.

Racked with guilt, Maryam is compelled to leave the safe comfort of her suburban home and mild English husband to return to Mazareh, the remote village on Iran's north-eastern border where her story began. There she must face her past and the memories of a life she was forced to leave behind.

In her quest to piece the family back together, Sara follows her mother to Iran, to discover the roots of her unhappiness and to try to bring her home.

Far from the terraced streets of London, among the snow-capped mountains and windswept plains that have haunted her mother's dreams for half a century, Sara finally learns about the terrible price Maryam once had to pay for her freedom, and about the love of the man who still waits for her.