When We Cease to Understand the World

About the Book

SELECTED FOR BARACK OBAMA'S SUMMER READING LIST

'A monstrous and brilliant book' Philip Pullman

'Wholly mesmerising and revelatory... Completely fascinating' William Boyd

Sometimes discovery brings destruction

When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain.

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled lives we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamín Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

About the Author :
Benjamín Labatut was born in Rotterdam in 1980 and grew up in The Hague, Buenos Aires and Lima. He has 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.

Review :
Ingenious, intricate and deeply disturbing... Labatut has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present We may be familiar with such things as Schrödinger's cat and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle... but the sheer audacity, the utter insanity of the ideas and the thinkers who discovered these ideas has never, in my experience, been so vividly and terrifyingly conveyed as in this short, monstrous, and brilliant book A deeply researched, exquisitely imagined group portrait of tormented geniuses... In Labatut's hands the story of quantum physics is violent, suspenseful and finally heartbreaking Absolutely brilliant. I was utterly gripped and wolfed it down. It feels as if he had invented an entirely new genre Labatut uses fiction to crack open the stories of scientists and mathematicians whose expanded our notions of the possible, while also presenting them as human, all too human A wholly mesmerising and revelatory book. A blend of limpid scientific exposition and bravura fictional gloss. Completely fascinating "Double physics!" Nothing in the school time-table was as unwelcome as those two words. Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World is doubly welcome: as a thrilling account of theories of physics, and as a series of highly-wrought imaginative extrapolations about the physicists who arrived at them I absolutely loved this. The writing crackles with energy. What a triumph. I hope it does really well and finds multitudinous readers A dazzling associative caper full of graceful arabesques linking continents and centuries and ideas Remind[s] us of fiction's power to take us to another world and expand our understanding of this one... When We Cease to Understand the World showcases the minds seeking to pierce the mysterious heart of mathematics Darkly dazzling... Given a fine, exacting translation from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, these pieces possess an insidiously persuasive power... this book-as haunting as it is erudite-stubbornly insists on connecting the wonders of scientific advancement to the atrocities of history The strangest and most original book I've read for years. It hovers in a state between fiction and non-fiction, or wave and particle, and makes an account of modern mathematics and science into something as eerie as a great ghost story A gripping meditation on knowledge and hubris... His prose is masterfully paced and vividly rendered in Adrian Nathan West's magnetic translation... With his slippery hybrid of fact and fiction, Labatut slyly applies the uncertainty principle to the human pursuit of knowledge itself It is a story about nature's fightback against human interference. In other words it is the story of the 21st century. In a literary industry obsessed with genres, it belongs to none Compelling, startling and utterly original. This book about physics is a work of art [A]n exquisitely written and continuously fascinating hybrid work of fiction and history It may be possible to actually feel your brain getting bigger as you read Tantalising... This is a truly thrilling work of imagination and chutzpah The new Bolaño Labatut shakes his readers and gifts them thought-provoking images, planting in them the necessity to read everything he's written and everything he writes as quickly as possible Labatut penetrates into the heart of a reality that only few have seen before him - and no one has yet described. A book of terrifying beauty Remarkable... melodiously poetic, but precise... Due to the increasing space that Labatut grants to fiction, he succeeds in giving an aesthetic answer to the question of the limits of knowledge: where there is uncertainty, literature grows a special power to enable experience. In this way, fiction can preserve the enlightenment of the blind He meticulously describes the moods and experiences of his historical protagonists. With this fictional approach, Labatut creates a bewitching closeness and immediacy. And at best a deeper, almost poetic understanding of what Schwarzschild's singularity or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle actually mean for our reality The limits of human knowledge: this is the territory in which Labatut, with great vigour and extraordinary intellectual rigour, enters in this admirable book