When We Cease to Understand the World
by Benjamín Labatut
(Translated by Adrian Nathan West)
A book review
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Walking with Bohr, Heisenberg had his first intuition of the radical otherness of the subatomic world. “If a mere particle of dust contains billions of atoms,” Bohr said to him as they were scaling the massifs of the Harz range, “what possible way is there to talk meaningfully of something so small?” The physicist – like the poet – should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections. From that summer onwards, Heisenberg understood that to apply concepts of classical physics such as position, velocity and momentum to a subatomic particle was sheer madness. That aspect of nature required a completely new language.
Two Pushkin Press titles were longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and both have now made the shortlist. One is David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black, in a translation by Anna Moschvakis, which I review here. The other is When We Cease to Understand the World by Chilean author Benjamín Labatut, originally published in Spanish as Un Verdor Terrible and now available in an English translation by Adrian Nathan West.
The protagonists of Labatut’s novel are a clutch of mathematical geniuses of the 20th Century, figures whose work led to a total rethinking of the way we look at the world. Unsurprisingly Einstein features here, but the ground-breaking nature of his Theory of Relativity almost pales when set alongside the revolutionary ideas of luminaries such as Alexander Grothendiek, Shinichi Moshizuki, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger (he of the un/dead cat fame). These were great minds who revealed to us a universe whose workings defy the “accepted” rules of physics, and challenge reality as we know it.
The concepts behind When We Cease to Understand the World are hardly new: the strangeness of genius; the murky dividing line between brilliance and insanity; the way in which going beyond the confines of accepted views of the world can untether us from our humanity; the dangers of cutting-edge mathematics, physics and technology when used for destructive purposes. What’s novel about this novel (excuse the poor pun) is its narrative approach. It is, in fact, made up of five segments: four of which are essay-like, and the fifth – The Night Gardener –a short “auto-fiction” piece which at first glance seems incongruous with the rest of the book, but which tidily wraps up some of the philosophical themes of the novel.
The four essay pieces culminate in the longest segment which also gives the novel its title, and which speaks of the rivalry between Heisenberg and Schrödinger. In an author’s note at the end of the book, we are told that although based on fact, the way the narrative is treated becomes increasingly fictional as the novel progresses. Thus, Prussian Blue, the opening chapter, speaks of Fritz Haber, whose discoveries saved the world from famine (through the production of fertilizer) but also led to him being dubbed “the father of chemical warfare”. According to Labatut, there is but one fictional paragraph in this part. It is hardly surprising that the subsequent chapters rely more on the author’s imagination. Indeed, whereas the opening chapter has a factual, quasi-academic feel to it (while remaining very readable), the subsequent segments show us the workings of the minds of the protagonists in a way which certainly could not have been documented and which implicitly suggest authorial invention. This approach has been compared to Sebald’s by some readers, but perhaps a closer analogy would be works of historical fiction featuring real characters or, in the film sector, a biopic “based on a true story” which, at the end, sends you down an internet rabbit hole to try to distinguish fact from fiction. This ambiguity at the heart of the novel becomes itself a metaphor for the mathematical theories discussed therein which seem so outrageous as to lead us to question reality.
Labatut’s approach allows him to tease out interesting and unexpected connections between the different strands of his story. Despite the essay-like style, this remains a gripping read, no doubt also thanks to Adrian Nathan West’s translation, which feels so natural that you forget that you are not reading the novel in its original language. What is particularly impressive is the way in which the complexity of abstruse areas of knowledge is conveyed to a general (and unscientific reader) such as myself, generally through the use of arresting imagery. Tellingly, Labatut has physicist Niels Bohr tell Heisenberg that “when discussing atoms, language could serve as nothing more than a kind of poetry”. I assure you that there is much poetry in When We Cease to Understand the World, a novel quite unlike any other novel I’ve read.
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