User:SafariScribe/When We Cease to Understand the World

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When We Cease to Understand the World
AuthorBenjamín Labatut
Original titleUn Verdor Terrible
TranslatorAdrian Nathan West
CountryUnited States
LanguageSpanish, English
GenreNonfiction, fiction, historical fiction, alternate history
Published2021
PublisherNew York Review of Books
Pages192
ISBN9781681375663

When We Cease to Understand the World (Spanish: Un Verdor Terrible; lit. 'A Terrible Greening') is a book by the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut. The book was published in 2021. It picked certain people, known as scientists, who had made sacrifices in revolutionizing science and other related humanitarian endeavors, focusing on the themes of sacrificial acts, madness, and destruction that lie beneath the discovery of science and its advancement.[1] The book was real, identified fiction and had either nonfiction, novel, or biographical narration.

Due to its difficulty in classification, many critics called it a novel; others called it a short story collection in essayistic mode.[2]

Background[edit]

When We Cease to Understand the World was written by Chilean author, Benjamín Labatut. It was written from a scientific historical perspective to show the interplay between scientific discovery and human experience.

The author Labatut, born in Rotterdam and raised in various cities around the world, drew inspiration from his fascination with the limits of scientific understanding and the mysteries that lie beyond it. He sought to highlight the tension between the relentless human pursuit of knowledge and the profound, sometimes monstrous unknowns that this pursuit uncovers. His work is characterized by its use of fiction to emphasize the indepth lives and personal costs of early scientists as well as in imaginative way.[3][4]

The book was first published in Spanish and later translated into English by Adrian Nathan West, who collaborated closely with Labatut to ensure the translation captured the essence and unique style of the original text.[3] The work has received significant acclaim, being shortlisted for prestigious awards and praised for its innovative narrative approach that defies traditional genre boundaries.

Plot summary[edit]

The book ended when the "night gardener" was telling the narrator about the death of the citrus trees, which atlas yield monstrous crop. But when those fruits ripen, the trees' whole limbs breaks because of huge weight, and after a few weeks, will be covered up by the ground with rotting lemons. To him, it was very strange.

Style and themes[edit]

Style[edit]

In When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut wrote with a beginning scenario of apocalypse. It was seen revolving his narration of the "Night Gardener"; wavering between different opinions of world creation and it's destruction.[2] Labatut used a precise style so that it often achieves concision, cruel and humor.[5]

When We Cease to Understand the World blends fact and fiction. While interweaving between real historical and scientific details of imaginative storytelling such as creating a hybrid form that is neither purely a novel, a short story collection, nor an essay, Labatut employs a style that studied the limits and mysteries of science, the lives of scientists and mathematicians whose discoveries often lead to profound and unsettling consequences.

The prose alternates between meticulously researched historical accounts and speculative, fictionalized narratives, which allows Labatut to make the personal and psychological impacts of scientific discoveries on the individuals involved. This blending of genres serves to highlight the complexities and moral ambiguities inherent in scientific advancement, showing how great intellectual achievements can lead to both enlightenment and destruction.[3][6]

The book’s style also reflects a fascination with the incomprehensible and the monstrous aspects of scientific progress. Labatut uses fiction not just to embellish historical facts but to probe the deeper, often darker aspects of human understanding and its limits. This method enables him to portray the inner turmoil and existential crises of figures like Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, making their stories both intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant.[6] Labatut's style in When We Cease to Understand the World is a distinctive blend of narrative forms, creating a compelling exploration of the human condition through the lens of scientific discovery and its discontents.

Themes[edit]

When We Cease to Understand the World also used the themes such as the duality of scientific discovery, the intersection of knowledge and destruction, and the philosophical mysteries underlying reality. Through historical and fictional narratives, Labatut delves into the lives of scientists like Heisenberg and Schrödinger, illustrating the profound, sometimes catastrophic implications of their work. The book emphasizes the inscrutability of the universe, the existential consequences of scientific advancements, and the inevitable confrontation with the unknown. [7]

When We Cease to Understand the World explores the theme of intersection between being mad and being super intelligent. It highlighted in details the popular belief that genius and well creative beings are works of mental pathology, which had spanned centuries from the time of Aristotle. While contemporary early modern research argued against being a scientific fact, Labatut used it in a poetic style while capturing the theme in a literary sense. For example, the scientists used in When We Cease to Understand the World we're simplified to varying degree of madness which extends from a normal eccentric behaviors to observable hallucinations; those which inspired some of their researches.

In the book, many scientists were described as having unnormal degree of compulsions which revolver their obsession with their work. As used when describing Karl Schwarzschild, who was a child and single-minded when doing astronomical equations in the margins of his school note books as well as the damages he gets after he had removed his hand gloves to make notes in a freezing cold. Also, Shinichi Mochizuki was described as one who stays for days without food or rest while reading the works of Alexander Grothendieck and was inspired to become a mathematician.

Critical reception[edit]

When We Cease to Understand the World was received with net positive reviews from critics.[8] It was selected by Barack Obama in 2021 for his annual Summer Reading List.[9] It was a Finalist for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction by Los Angeles Times. While Labatut said the book is a "work of fiction based on real events", John Banville of the British magazine The Guardian argued of it better called a nonfiction novel, since the majority of the characters are historical figures, and the narratives were based on historical fact.[10] Franklin Ruth of The New Yorker said it was a meditation in prose that bears a familial relationship to the work of W. G. Sebald or Olga Tokarczuk, while detailing a sequential biography of both.[11]

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in The New York Times Book Review praised the book as "a gripping meditation on knowledge and hubris. [Labatut] casts the flickering light of gothic fiction on 20th-century science",[12] while John Williams in The New York Times Book Review says that When We Cease to Understand the World "fuses fact and fiction to turn the modern history of physics into a gripping narrative of obsessed scientists, world-changing discoveries, and the ultimate results—often quite dark—of our drive to understand the fundamental workings of the universe." While reviewing the book for the The Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks praised the book as "Darkly dazzling". Furtherly asserting that Labatut illustrates "the unbreakable bond between horror and beauty. The book as haunting as it is, stubbornly insists on connecting the wonders of scientific advancement to the atrocities of history."[13]

In a starred review by Publishers Weekly, the book called 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."[14] Constance Grady in writing for the American news website Vox wrote, "When We Cease to Understand the World is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read all year, and one of the weirdest, too. Its subject seems to be scientific awe: the cosmic horror of seeing what lies at the center of the universe, and how very far such realities are from our small human ways of perceiving the world."[15]

References[edit]

Notes[edit]

Citations[edit]

  1. ^ Shaheen 2021, pp. 715.
  2. ^ a b Muller 2022, pp. 9–28.
  3. ^ a b c The Booker Prizes 2022.
  4. ^ Literary Hub 2022.
  5. ^ Daguerre 2021, p. 24.
  6. ^ a b Steinbeck et al. 2021.
  7. ^ Laverty 2022.
  8. ^ Shaheen 2021, pp. 716.
  9. ^ Janfaza 2021.
  10. ^ Banville 2020.
  11. ^ Nast & Franklin 2021.
  12. ^ Fonseca-Wollheim 2021.
  13. ^ Sacks 2021.
  14. ^ PublishersWeekly.com.
  15. ^ Grady 2022.

Bibliography[edit]

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