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It's 1828. (No it isn't!) No, but for the purpose of this novel, it is. Sort of. Well, that's where it starts. Or ends.

I'll start over. So it's a more-or-less fictionalised story of these two German scientists from the 18th century:

Alexander von Humboldt, geographer and explorer
Carl Friedrich Gauss, mathematician and physicist

The novel starts with the two of them meeting as old men in 1828 and then follows two parallel lines: that meeting and what happens to them afterwards forms the backdrop against which we're shown how they got there, from childhood to old age, from unusually intelligent kids to scientists who would revolutionise the way we see the world – each in their own way. Because obviously, this was one of the big turning points in history, the rise of the modern age where the world gets not only measured but also where those measures themselves are invented, where we came up with brand-new systems for learning (von Humboldt's brother Wilhelm invented the modern university), politics (the founding fathers of the US, Napoleon and others make cameo appearances) and ideas. I recently read Reinhard Koselleck's On the Semantics of Historical Time, where he notes that the late 18th century and early 19th century was the time where individual steps forward became progress, where freedoms became freedom, where revolutions – as in ever-repeating cycles – became the revolution, the thing after which (supposedly) you can never go back to the way things were; it was the time where mankind (ahem) started pulling in one direction.

But I digress, back to the novel. For starters, it becomes obvious rather quickly that Humboldt and Gauss may admire each other but they don't like each other very much. They're completely different, not only as persons; Humboldt is a cold fish, with seemingly almost no emotions or life outside his own research, yet very much an empirist: he's the guy who'll climb a mountain or drink poison to see what happens. Gauss, on the other hand, is a theorist when it comes to science – hates fieldwork, publishes his greatest work at 21 years old based only on working it out with a pen and paper – yet a bitter old man who can't not live in the world with its women and politicians and (disappointing) children. (Of course, I have no idea exactly how historically correct their characterisations are.)

Likewise, there are two sides to this novel. One (more or less) learnéd historical discourse on, on the one hand, how we construct an image of the world, how we understand it, how science works, and on the other what fame and monomania can do to a person. The other side of the novel is a rather wacky comedy about two scientists, where the humour doesn't work nearly as often as Kehlmann thinks. Now, this is really a genre I like, but compare it to a book like Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which takes a very similar story (to the point where Mason & Dixon show up in this book) and spins it into something much bigger (some might say crazier). Or Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before which, sure, has an even flatter plot (not one of Eco's best works) but instead runs rings around Kehlmann when it comes to the historical and scientific and how it makes us what we are/were/will be. Kehlmann parks somewhere between the two and ends up... lukewarm.

While there's a lot of interesting themes here and some of the chapters are quite excellent (the final chapters of Humboldt being toured across Russia like some ageing rock star, in particular, and anything involving his frustrated assistant Bonpland), I can't help feel that this is a much better novel in theory than in practice; like it could have used one more edit to piece it all together – I can see where he wants it to go, but he doesn't quite manage to incorporate BOTH the characters and their achievements. Lizzy quoted one of the best passages in the novel, Gauss' view of the world. But at the same time, that's sort of the problem. Apart from making them into clowns, Kehlmann doesn't quite seem what to do with these characters. He relates their story but doesn't tell a story of his own. Kehlmann stays superficial, mentions inventions and names and disoveries but that's about it, and in the process polarizes tht two characters to the point where it almost seems like Humboldt's entire character is "the guy who's not Gauss" and the other way around.

Maybe I just expected too much of it. It's not a bad novel, not at all; it's quite enjoyable, it's an easy read, you'll laugh and you might just learn something along the way. But much like human progress wasn't finished by Napoleon, there's a lot more to be found in the world than this.

It starts in the poorer countries. Of course it does; that's where all the major pandemics start, among the people nobody cares about. Odd happenings; a Chinese farmer attacked by a child who appears to be rabid, quickly discarded rumours from the shanty towns outside Jo'burg... the governments try to hush it up, old enemies blame each other for trying to spread panic, the smarter businessmen try to make money off it... all for nothing. Because yes, the dead are rising. When there's no more room in hell, yada yada yada. The zombies eat the flesh of the living, and all of mankind's defenses that we've put in place over the millennia - whether military, political, religious or psychological - prove hopelessly inadequate. The victims number dozens, then thousands, then millions, then billions. And every victim gets up and becomes the enemy. By the time we start figuring out what to do, it's almost too late: the entire human species is outnumbered, cornered - and as always, still at each others' throats.

Brooks' novel definitely owes a lot to the classic zombie stories - Matheson, Romero, Fulci - but where most of those stories focus on a small group of survivors, he takes a universal (if slightly US-centric) view. The whole book presents itself as a series of interviews with those who survived - from politicians and military leaders down to ordinary people who made it either by dumb luck or by committing acts just as inhuman as those of their opponents.

Of course, this sort of storytelling is so easy to get wrong - for one thing, it removes a lot of the tension, since we know right from the get-go that the war was won (after a fashion). For another, in order to make us care about these characters that are just in the story for 5-10 pages, Brooks has to pull out all the stops and resort to storytelling cliches a little too often. The good news is he's a good enough writer to pull it off (most of the time) and that the format makes it possible for him to touch down on different parts of the conflict and tell the story in detail - leaving it to the reader to piece it together into a whole.

Weaving in shades of classic post-apocalyptic tales like On the Beach, The Last Man or War of the Worlds, World War Z manages not only the genre-obligatory social critique and "are we really better than them" angle (though the latter could have been more fleshed out) but also a number of scenes that stick in my mind. The US army taking a stand that turns from PR coup into disaster and near annihilation; Russian clerics taking it upon themselves to execute all infected soldiers to spare them from suicide; mankind's last great fleet, cobbled together from everything from old warships (the HMS Victory, the Aurora) to rowboats, trying to escape out to sea; North Korea simply... disappearing; Iran and Pakistan nuking each other into oblivion to stop the billions of Chinese and Indian refugees - but of course, radiation doesn't stop zombies; American families trying to survive without training in the frozen wastes of Northern Canada; and all those... people, all those individuals.

So what if Brooks makes it very obvious which buttons he's pushing now and then? So what if we can figure out how it ends? It's chilling, riveting, and somehow painfully realistic. Four BRAAAAAAAAAAAAINS out of five.

Q: You know what happens when you play a country song backwards?
A: You get your house back, you get your girl back, and your dog comes back to life.

The two brothers Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan are losers in every sense of the word. They lost their parents when they were young, they've lost their chances at making something of themselves, they lost their house, Frank lost his girlfriend and Jerry Lee lost his leg; now they're stuck in Reno, surviving from day to day in any way they can, drinking far too much and hanging onto their dreams not because they have any illusions about them coming true anymore but just because it seems to be all that's left. Until Jerry Lee bursts into Frank's room one night, inconsolable, and tells him he got behind the wheel after one drink too many, ran over a kid and now he doesn't know what to do. And all the things in their lives that have remained at a shaky status quo for years suddenly get put to the test.

And us, we took the bad luck and strapped it around our feet like concrete. We did the worst imaginable thing you could do. We ran away.

Vlautin's debut novel has a fantastic sense of... presence. He plants his reader right in the narrator Frank's head as he tries to save his brother and himself, in a succinct but incredibly descriptive prose. You could make much of the similarities to American storytellers like Carver, Denis Johnson or Yates, and the dustjacket does, repeatedly; but at the same time, Vlautin is a musician as well and The Motel Life reminds me of nothing so much as some song Tom Waits should have written - perhaps "Burma Shave", the story of a young girl who hitches a ride with Elvis Presley's ghost and ends up dead in a ditch to the tune of "Summertime", or "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis", or "9th and Hennepin"... it's all dingy bars, used car lots and empty whiskey bottles, but also a set of characters that for all their fucked-up lives never come across as clichéd white trash jokes. Vlautin genuinely loves his losers and wants them to make it even though both he and his readers know they probably won't, and there is something beautiful in all of them. Jerry Lee draws every part of his life in black and white, and Frank keeps telling elaborate stories that all seem like fictional variations on his own life and dreams; anything to stay alive.

Look, here's a piece of advice. I don't know if it's any good or not for you, you're the only one who'll know if it is. What you got to do is think about the life you want, think about it in your head. Make it a place where you want to be; a ranch, a beach house, a penthouse on the top of a skyscraper. It doesn't matter what it is, but a place that you can hide out in. When things get rough, go there. And if you find a place and it quits working, just change it. (...) Hope is the key. You can make shit up, there's no law against that. Make up some place you and your brother can go if you want. It might not work, but it might. Ain't too hard to try.

And it does work, if not always for Frank then at least for Vlautin. Sure, there's a few points where you wonder just how much more he is going to put his characters through the wringer, but he always stays on just the right side of melodrama... after all, what is a good country song but a series of just slightly exaggerated everyday stories set to music that tugs at something in your chest? Willy Vlautin knows how to make a typewriter sound like a weeping pedal steel guitar, I just got to know Frank and Jerry Lee better than I might have wanted to, and it breaks my fucking heart.

Aké, the first volume of Nigerian Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka's (possibly slightly fictionalised) autobiography, is the first book of his I've read. For most authors, an autobiography is probably not the best place to start; most of the time, I want a reason to care about what the author has done before getting into his life story.

In this case, though, it doesn't disappoint at all. Aké chronicles young Wole's childhood up to about 11 years of age, and given that he was born in 1934, that's a fairly tumultuous time. While the world war rages somewhere just beyond the horizon, Nigeria is somewhere in between the old ways and the new ones, stuck between old tribal kingdoms and the new world, the old religion and Christianity, the old language and English, still ruled by the British but beginning to find a new identity of its own - which isn't an easy process, as shown by the occasional sobering flash-forward to Nigeria in the early 80s.

Soyinka spins this into an amazingly vivid tale, which doesn't shy away from dark subjects but tackles it all with a great sense of humour and the wide eyes of a child who, at first, doesn't understand half of what's going on around him. In a slightly unusual but very well-crafted narrative, he tells the whole story from the perspective of himself as a child (I'm somewhat reminded of Roth's The Plot Against America) which means that as he grows up, the story becomes more intricate, the adult characters more three-dimensional, and his observations more astute; mirroring, in a way, a young country starting to find its footing (Nigeria wouldn't achieve independence until 1960). As with many childhood stories, it's more of an episodic tale than a straight narrative, which means that it tends to be a little disjointed and slow-paced at times - but even then the fantastically colourful prose makes it worth it. For all the times the novel makes me crack up laughing, or even be nostalgic for a time I've never lived in in a country I never visited and a culture I was never part of, there's always the sly adult Soyinka somewhere behind it, using his young self as an only mostly reliable narrator to describe how we come to understand - and challenge - the world.

Call us Ishmael.

It takes almost 100 pages until I'm struck by this strange, recurring "we." After all, it's not as if the narrator takes up a lot of room in Carsten Jensen's 700-page novel; for the most part, We, The Drowned is narrated in the same way as many other novels with no clear protagonist, some sort of omnicient storyteller who never gets personal, never says "I" or reveals his or her name. It's just that the reader is occasionally reminded that this story, the history of the little Danish town of Marstal, where every man is a sailor and every woman is left waiting on shore, is narrated by this "we." "We" saw the cocky sailor Laurids Madsen go to war with the Germans in 1848, survive the destruction of the Danish navy by a miracle worthy of a Salman Rushdie character and return home a changed person. "We" saw his son Albert, like a modern Telemachos, try to fill his disappeared father's boots, help build the last sailing merchant fleet that took the town's men all over the world, only to return home to find out that the u-boats of WW1 weren't nearly as big a threat as steam and diesel. "We" saw his adopted son Knud Erik and his mother take the step into the modern world and humanity's great suicide from 1939 to 1945. It's this ghostly choir of unnamed men (and occasional women), "we" who saw the birth of a modern world, a modern land - from the sea.

We, The Drowned spans a century, with scores of characters, echoing Homer, Melville, Lindgren, Kipling, Márquez and Grass in one great sailor's pidgin of influences. As the years pass, the great ideas and seamen pass along the horizon, from Cook to the Tirpitz, from 19th century optimism to 20th century mass-production of death, but the focus is always on the ones manning the oars. It's a simple, but incredibly effective trick; use the standard sailor's stories that anyone from a country with a coast will be familiar with, and then have the sailing routes connect the dots. There are boys' adventures to keep you reading, pirates and convoys and impossible love stories; but the sailors from the insignificant little town sail across waves of larger stories, larger philosophies shifting underneath them; visit the whole world, see it all happen, tie the world together, make it bigger and smaller at the same time, and always returning back home. The focus is on half a dozen people, but in the background there's always this echo of "we", everyone.

You can find weak points in We, The Drowned. Over 700 pages there's room for the occasional lull, very little room for women, etc. But somehow, it's the kind of novel where the weak points only emphasize how great the rest of it is, how solid a novel it is. Carsten Jensen sends his constantly ruminating Marstalians out on that ship that we're all on, where both navigare and legere necesse est.