Staff Pick
Spellbinding, illuminating, imaginative. The sort of book that imbues the everyday with a wash of light. Labatut defies genre, taking creative liberties in charting the relationship between scientific discovery, madness, and mutually assured destruction. Sure to keep you up at night, perhaps in the garden, pondering the existence of black holes while replicating them in the earth below... Recommended By Nadia N., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
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.
Review
“Absolutely brilliant. I was utterly gripped and wolfed it down. It feels as if he has invented an entirely new genre.” Mark Haddon
Review
“A thrilling account of theories of physics, and as a series of highly-wrought imaginative extrapolations about the physicists who arrived at them.” Geoff Dyer
Review
“Labatut has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.” John Banville, The Guardian
About the Author
Benjamín Labatut was born in Rotterdam in 1980 and grew up in The Hague, Buenos Aires, and Lima. He published two award-winning works of fiction prior to When We Cease to Understand the World, which is his first book to be translated into English. Labatut lives with his family in Santiago, Chile.
Adrian Nathan West is a novelist, essayist, and translator living in Spain. His criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications. He has translated books from German, Catalan, and Spanish, including Jean Améry’s Charles Bovary, Country Doctor (NYRB Classics) and Pere Gimferrer (NYRB Poets).