When We Cease to Understand The World

I just finished Benjamín Labatut’s remarkable book When We Cease To Understand The World. It’s a book that blends non-fiction and fiction, that tells the stories of scientists of the twentieth century and teh price they paid for their discoveries. It is a subtle book, neither a collection of short stories or a single novel, but it is all tied together. Remarkably, the book begins in the world of non-fiction and gets more substantially fictional until the end. The last piece in the book is the most concrete – and teh most fictional- and references all the stories that were told before in a very fine-grained way. It is a book about uncertainty, singularity, probabilities and the price of seeing the world as it is.

Benjamin Labatut on his book:

What fascinates me is not so much science per se, but the limits of science: those ideas and discoveries that we are unable to fully comprehend. Science is a theme, but the larger theme is mystery. What I believe is captivating about these stories is not just their information content, but the enigma which lies at the heart of them. They seem to point past us, towards what is incomprehensible, or marvellous, or, indeed, monstrous. What I admire most about science is that it is completely unwilling to accept the many mysteries that surround us: it is stubborn, and wonderfully so. When it comes face to face with the unknown, it whips out a particle accelerator, a telescope, a microscope, and smashes reality to bits, because it wants – Because it needs! – to know. Literature is similar, in some respects: it is born from an impossible wish, the desire to bind this world with words. In that, it is as ambitious as science. Because for us human beings, it is never enough to know god: we have to eat him. That’s what literature is for me: putting the world in your mouth.

You say that ‘the quantity of fiction grows throughout the book’ – why is that? 

Several reasons: the ideas become increasingly complex and abstract as the book moves along, so it was necessary to increase the fictional content to captivate the reader, and to make very complicated (and usually very boring) ideas come to life. Another reason is that I was not merely interested in the outward development and impact of science, but on the personal cost of these strange epiphanies, and only fiction can delve into that particular void, the inside of the human mind. There is a lot of fiction in all the texts of the book, except the first, where there are only six lines. But it is a very specific type of fiction, one that tries to approach what non-fiction cannot achieve. I use it reluctantly, not merely as an ingredient to sugar the pill, but as a chemical fix, a shot in the arm that allows the reader to crawl into the strangest areas of reality, those deranged landscapes that, even if where to bump into them head-on, in plain daylight, with both your eyes wide open, you would have a hard time believing they are real. 

I love a book that says what it needs to in 200 pages or so. More often than not a writer needs to rely on both dense narratives and rich language to do this, much as a movie maker uses image and plot, or a lyricist use the music and the words. It’s remarkable to read a book in translation that preserves this richness.

Samantha Harvey’s book Orbital was the last book I read that does something like this with imagery and a rejection of traditional narrative structure. I found both through the Booker Prizes website, which seems to be revelling in this type of literature these days.