The MANIAC
by Benjamín Labatut
After the Booker shortlisted When We Cease to Understand the World, translated into English by Adrian Nathan West, Benjamín Labatut returns with The MANIAC, his first book written directly in English. This is another novel about great scientists of the 20th century, the delicate divide between genius, obsession and madness, and the terrifying beauty (or beautiful terror) of cutting-edge science and technology.
As in his previous novel Labatut blends fact and fiction. The book is divided into three sections. The first, “PAUL: or The Discovery of the Irrational” is a relatively brief introductory segment which consist of an account of the life, and death by suicide, of Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest. This section, which appears to be purely factual, introduces some of the concerns of the rest of the book. Ehrenfest falls into a depression when he realizes what the rise of the Nazis will mean for minorities, including his disabled son. During the same period, he also realizes that not only are the logical bases of “established” science being challenged by new discoveries, leading to a terrifying void which also has ethical implications.
The second part of the book, “JOHN or the Mad Dreams of Reason” is a fictionalised biography of John von Neumann, perhaps the leading figure of the group of Hungarian-American émigré scientists referred to as the “Martians”. Neumann and his colleagues were key to the Manhattan Project which led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and subsequently retained a close collaboration with the military, particularly in connection with the development of the hydrogen bomb and pioneering experiments in “weather warfare”. Neumann however was brilliant in practically all the fields he worked in. His studies in game theory, economics and computing (notably his role in the development of the “Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer” – the MANIAC of the title) are at the basis of contemporary developments in AI. Neumann’s story is recounted through the points of view of (historical) individuals who knew him, in the shape of imaginary “interviews” and factual snippets.
The book ends with “LEE or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence” an account of the success of artificial intelligence machines to challenge and beat the world’s champions of chess and even more complex games such as the Chinese game Go.
I am no science buff, but the
way in which Labatut speaks about scientific figures and ideas is captivating.
For me, this book was an unexpected page-turner. The approach is also very particular. I
suppose the genre might be called biographical fiction – except that it’s
strange to describe as “fiction” a book in which most if not all of the facts
and events described actually occurred.
Possibly “literary non-fiction” might be closer to the mark, but then
again the creative way in which the book is put together and, particularly in its second part, the vivid
imagination required to present a character through different voices and points
of view, make this book very different from your typical work of non-fiction. What’s more important, however, is that this
is a formula which works brilliantly.
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