English language
Published 2020 by Pushkin Press, Limited.
A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.
Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.
At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
Fast-paced, fun and terrifying stories about ideas, people and complex systems at the edge of understanding, half fact, half fantasy. Stories of the breakdown of sensemaking, the ensuing madness, and about a darkness at the heart of things.
An exceptionally difficult book to rate and review; so much so, I've left it a month before making any comment. I'm not normally much for historical realism in my fiction, but the first story in this often bizarre collection, Prussian Blue, pulled me in hard, and I had to devour it in one satisfying gulp.
Labatut takes historical figures (chiefly from the sciences, with physicists and mathematicians at the forefront), and twists them into often grotesque tales, peppered with fiction and his own invention. The whole book has an addictive and propulsive quality (hence my need to fire through the first story in one sitting), reeling from event to event without hardly catching a breath. Where and with whom one story starts, is in no way guaranteed to end in the same place and with the same person; in a way history itself is the main character here. As Labatut …
An exceptionally difficult book to rate and review; so much so, I've left it a month before making any comment. I'm not normally much for historical realism in my fiction, but the first story in this often bizarre collection, Prussian Blue, pulled me in hard, and I had to devour it in one satisfying gulp.
Labatut takes historical figures (chiefly from the sciences, with physicists and mathematicians at the forefront), and twists them into often grotesque tales, peppered with fiction and his own invention. The whole book has an addictive and propulsive quality (hence my need to fire through the first story in one sitting), reeling from event to event without hardly catching a breath. Where and with whom one story starts, is in no way guaranteed to end in the same place and with the same person; in a way history itself is the main character here. As Labatut weaves and wends his way through events at breakneck pace, only the timeline seems to matter, with the events strung along it. The stories bear little connection with each other as regards the characters and events, but the themes echo across all.
Personally, I loved it, but I can see how and why many other readers might not. Those expecting a truly historical account of these figures may be aghast at the liberties taken; the converse may be true of those expecting wholly literary fiction. Although Labatut points out in his acknowledgements some of the fictional elaborations he makes, it is mostly unknown (to the layman, of course) exactly what is fiction and what is fact. But herein, I feel, lies the true beauty of the book, where the medium becomes the message (or massage, McLuhan fans); it is the very act of unknowing that Labatut is extolling. No matter how deeply we dig, literally into the earth, via microscope into the quantum world, or backwards through the annals of history, we ultimately are left none the wiser. Is this such a bad thing? The cloud of unknowing is a beautiful thing; the pursuit of knowledge itself, the path, is the goal, just as the medium can hold the message.
I feel like Labatut's main intention is laid bare and made (perhaps a little too) explicit in the final story (The Night Gardener), which I will quote directly from to end this review:
We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world.
Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power....The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.
I have mixed feelings about too much fictionalizing recent real people, but at the same time, I'm overwhelmed by how Labatut interweaves historical facts and imagination. It is horrifying to sense the duality that genius scientific discoveries possibly bring to unexpected destruction. It's hard to decide what genre this book fits into (hybrid of non-fiction, essay, and fiction, maybe?)
It's okay, interesting vision. The ending section was the most beautiful, probably because it was the only personal part of the book. The ending 'theme' was forced down your throat by the end.
The creative madness of genius scientists. Evolves from fact through to terrifying fabulation, without straying from the essence. Strikingly original.
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A little over my head but still thought-provoking.
In the face of non-deterministic societal evil and the limits of an individual life or grasp or genius... "When We Cease To Understand The World" encapsulates it well. The format of documentary slipping into fantastical nightmare is fitting and yet weird to assess.
The blend of non-fiction and fiction can be a lil' uncomfortable at times but it expertly uses the medium to succinctly explain the departure from entirely understanding the world to having to accept that we simply cannot. It's a special book where you'll likely learn a lil' something while also embracing the chaos of it all.
What a terrific read! It is a classic theme: the push and pull between opposites (creation and destruction; madness and civilization), but Labutut has breathed new life into the familiar and crafted a fantastic blend of fiction and non-fiction to progress his way through the development of his thinking. I've been recommending this non-stop since I started it. One of those books that certainly stays with you long after reading. My guess is this has to do with the nearly anatomical precision with which Labutut splays his characters' vulnerabilities, and perhaps our own proximity to horror on a massive scale.
