When We Cease to Understand the World
Benjamin Labatut tr. Adrian Nathan West
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
When We Cease to Understand the World
Benjamin Labatut tr. Adrian Nathan West
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... gripping.
... ingenious, intricate and deeply disturbing.
... as compact and potent as a capsule of cyanide, a poison whose origin story takes up much of the opening chapter—the first of many looping forays into the wonders and horrors unleashed by science in the past few centuries.
This fleet, darkly dazzling survey of modern innovations in chemistry illustrates the unbreakable bond between horror and beauty, life-saving and life-destroying.
Reading like an episodic digest, Chilean writer Labatut’s stylish English-language debut offers an embellished, heretical, and thoroughly engrossing account of the personalities and creative madness that gave rise to some of the 20th century’s greatest scientific discoveries.
Each section of the novel centers on one of the scientists in question, and in the early going Labatut comes off as more of a scientific historian than a novelist; the first chapter, on Haber, reads like a biographical sketch. But by the time we get to Erwin Schrödinger, Labatut’s writing becomes more interior and complex as the physicist scrabbles for footing within the scientific community and Indian religious tradition, then descends into an obsession with an underage girl he meets at a sanatorium. Just as quantum physics threw the bedrock principles of the universe into question, the novel shifts further from fact, closing with a fully fictional coda. In structure and content, the novel is highly mannered, but Labatut’s high-concept approach makes room for an emotional impact; you can feel the center stop holding as scientific triumphs become Pyrrhic victories.