Labatut, like Sebald (and The Rings of Saturn connects in multiple ways with this book) has written a peripatetic text that comprises a series of what look like essays but include an increasing amount of fictional elements: what holds them together are an interest in scientific knowledge and the dangers and responsibilities that understanding should impose on us.

The most obvious connection with Sebald is the subtext of German Fascism: Nazi silkworms (yep, Rings of Saturn), the use of amphetamines by Hitler's troops, various characters who end up in the camps, the development of Zyklon B, all make an appearance. There's also the spectre of Hiroshima that haunts the development of theories of quantum mechanics. Ideas of the monstrous and monstrosity return, as well as the image of a dark heart, though whether that's in the world or in humankind is left floating.

It's worth saying that I am probably one of the least scientifically-minded readers and yet I loved this. The wonder of quantum mechanics fascinates me though I can't begin to get my head around all those equations and theories - but that doesn't matter here and it's precisely the paradox uncovered by Schrodinger, the idea of a universe of potentialities and possibilities that evade the common sense of physical science that excites my imagination. It makes me think of a closed book, a text which contains a whole spectrum of meanings and interpretations contained within it which will be released by each individual reader as the book 'travels' through its readerly history and reception.

The writing and translation here are outstanding, this never reads like a translated text and there's a pliable texture to the prose that eases the transitions from topic to topic: what could have been jarring jumps in the hand of another author, here flow seamlessly and fascinatingly - the mode of writing thus seems to be making connections that parallel the programmatic stance of the text itself.

A clever but, importantly, humane book.

How do I even describe this book? It’s like falling into a black hole, into the minds of those who pushed the boundaries of reality. It’s both an exploration of the limits of genius and at the same time a commentary on what happens when those limits are broken. Fact becomes fiction and the rules and lines are blurred increasingly as we progress through the book.

When We Cease To Understand The World begins with an essay, mostly factual, concerning hydrogen cyanide, its development and use during the war. From here we follow an interwoven series of stories riding along with the world’s greatest thinkers – physicists, mathematicians and scientists as they push the limits of knowledge and discovery. The stories are based in fact but as the book progresses, like in quantum theory, the rules start to break down...

The book explores what it’s like to be at the very peak of your field and what happens to the mind when your days are spent pushing the edges of knowledge. Breakdown, transcendence and the dissolution of limits. I can’t really describe the genre - it’s fact meets fiction meets something else entirely… Safe to say, I loved this book. It’s just so different. I can see myself reading it over and over, with a little time in between to let it settle in my brain. A big five stars!

<i>Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computer power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.</i>

This is a very interesting book. It’s short and easy to read. It often reads like a summary of Wikipedia entries (which I didn’t mind). I DID find myself checking online frequently to see what was invented and what wasn’t. As far as I could discern, it’s all mainly true; what can be easily identified as fictional are the parts that take us ‘inside’ a character’s experience (i.e. Schrödinger’s trip to the sanatorium).

I was reminded of Sebald, <i>The Magic Mountain</i>, the Alex Garland TV show "Devs", and of <i>A Musical Offering</i> by Luis Sagasti, in terms of how this uses the essay, history, and the ‘non-fictional’ form. It’s fun to read books where you’re like, wow, I really am learning a lot!

For example, I learned about:
- Karl Schwarzschild, who came up with a theory that proved the existence of black holes before they were discovered. Fought in World War I and died of an autoimmune disease he caught in the front, a disease that made his skin decay (a convenient visual metaphor for Europe post World War I)
- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_suicide_in_Demmin">The mass suicides in Germany</a>following the advance of the Red Army (I can’t actually remember now if I read this IN the book, or in an interview with the author)
- The Japanese mathematician<a href="https://www.nature.com/news/the-biggest-mystery-in-mathematics-shinichi-mochizuki-and-the-impenetrable-proof-1.18509">Shinichi Mochizuki</a>, who claims to have solved a famous proof, but no one can understand his work.
- Fritz Haber, who I already knew about from the Radiolab episode
- Alexander Grothendieck, definitely one of the most interesting figures in the book. A mathematical genius who gave it all up to become a recluse. Kept a dream journal that led him to conclude that God exists. Almost starved himself to death.

Themes of the book:
- Science. Does science have a responsibility? What position is the scientist/genius in if they’re discovering something that can genuinely do humanity a lot of harm? Are some things better off NOT being known?
- Mysticism. Math is basically Harry Potter magic. I also thought of Philip K. Dick quite a bit, and his descent into madness/paranoia.
- Determinism, and how quantum mechanics basically killed it. If not even one miserable particle can be perfectly apprehended, how can ANYTHING be known?

I DO think the book would have benefitted from a more central Sebaldian figure/narrator organising the narrative. But I also understand/respect that his was NOT something the author wanted to do (it definitely would have made this a different book). I say this because the concluding chapter, set in Chile, is one of the strongest. Is the Night Gardner supposed to be Borges? Is the garden he’s working on the Garden of the Forking Paths? That is officially my hot take (even though the author is Chilean, not Argentinean!). Basically, it was a strong way to end the book, and I wouldn’t have minded seeing more of this ‘I’ narrator more often (maybe in future work).

Overall, interesting and informative. I don’t know if this is a book I would have ever picked up myself, but I’m glad I did. I would definitely read something by this author again.

Thanks to the publisher and to Net Galley for the ARC.

<i>What was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself.</i>

When We Cease to Understand the World has been translated by Adrian Nathan West from Benjamín Labatut's Un Verdor Terrible.

The best overview of the book comes in the author's own words on his German publisher's website - https://www.suhrkamp.de/images/sonderseite/Labatut-Interview-neu.pdf - and thanks to my friend Neil for introducing me both to the book and pointing me towards this overview of it. His review can also be found on this site

This is a fascinating blend of essay and fiction - as the author says:

"The book starts out with an essay which is 99% non-fiction, followed by two short stories and finally a novella. As the book progresses, the fictional content increases, but all the stories are based on hard facts." (apparently just one paragraph in the essay is fictional - I am intrigued which one)

The essay Prussian Blue is based around hydrogen cyanide: "by following that tiny –yet utterly deadly– molecule I found a thread that wove together science, art and history, assassinations and suicides, and that lead me to some of the greatest chemical discoveries, war crimes and massacres of the 20th Century." This part of the novel felt very Sebaldian, and it was interesting to see his The Rings of Saturn listed in the references alongside more factual books. Labatut's manages to make the ideas flow seamlessly but with a wide range:

"An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts."

This sense of the danger of advanced science / mathematics, both to mankind, but to the mental state of those practising it, is a key theme.

Schwarzschild's Singularity tells how "a German soldier on the Russian front of the First World War was the first person to solve Einstein’s equations of the theory of general relativity, which are astoundingly hard. He did so while suffering a blistering skin disease and died soon after sending his results to Einstein. The strangest thing of all is that in his calculations there appeared, for the first time, a monster that was not to be recognized till decades later: the black hole."

Schwarzschild himself is quoted as saying:

"Often I have been unfaithful to the heavens. My interest has never been limited to things situated in space, beyond the moon, but has rather followed those threads woven between them and the darkest zones of the human soul, as it is there that the new light of science must be shone."

The next short story, The Heart of the Heart, focuses on pure mathematics and begins:

"On the morning of August 31, 2012, the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki published four articles on his blog. Those six hundred pages contained a proof of one of the most important conjectures in number theory, known as a + b = c."

a 'proof' that still today bewilders the rest of the mathematical world. The story also tells of Alexander Grothendieck, a Fields medal winner and brilliant mathematician, who, in his later year, retreated into reclusion and mysticism.

The final piece, the novella When We Cease to Understand the World (from which the English title of the whole book is taken), focuses on the rival discoveries in quantum mechanics of Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. Per Labutut "what really interested me was the conditions under which each one of them had their particular epiphany" and it is here the fiction really kicks in as he takes what is known ("for example, we know that Schrödinger spent a week in Arosa with a lover, but we do not know her name, her age, we really know absolutely nothing about her") and adds a detailed and imaginative fictional story around it.

But this is also a story about how the advances of quantum theory made the world both more explainable, in a purely mathematical sense, but much less comprehensible.

"Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding."

(from the 'secret gardener' in the final chapter)

Although the focus is on the Schrödinger/Heisenberg rivalry, perhaps the most interesting contrast for me was with Einstein, who found Heisenberg's theories particularly confounding:

"The father of relativity was a great master of visualization: all of his ideas about space and time had been born of his capacity to imagine himself in the most extreme physical circumstances. For this reason, he was unwilling to accept the restrictions demanded by Heisenberg, who seemed to have gouged out both his eyes in order to see further
...
Einstein became the greatest enemy of quantum mechanics. ... “This theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts,” he wrote to one of his friends."

This section also finishes, in a change of style, with a shorter, much more personal chapter, which stands in an intriguing relationship to the rest of the book.

A wonderful book - a hybrid of accessible science and novelistic imagination, and highly thought provoking, one that leads the reader down many interesting areas of further reading.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

4.5 stars rounded to 5

In an interview with the author which can be found at https://www.suhrkamp.de/images/sonderseite/Labatut-Interview-neu.pdf, the first question is “Could you summarise your book in two sentences?” Labatut’s answer is:

“This book is about what happens when we reach the edges of science; when we come face to face with what we cannot understand. It is about what occurs to the human mind when it pushes past the outer limits of thought, and what lies beyond those limits.”

The whole of that interview is well worth reading and it does a far better job of reviewing this book than I can do.

I picked the book up on NetGalley in the Literary Fiction section. I mention this because the first part of the book, Prussian Blue, is “99% non-fiction” (the author’s phrase) and traces the rather unpleasant history of hydrogen cyanide (with a lot of digressions into related thoughts). After that, the fiction content gradually increases as the book progresses. All the way through, we are tracking real people and real events (e.g. the second story follows Schwarzschild who solved, for the first time, Einstein’s equations of general relativity whilst simultaneously fighting on the Russian front in WWI and dying from a deadly disease), but gradually Labutut introduces more and more flights of imagination. Some of the time, it feels as though we are reading a kind of horror story where the scary ideas at the heart of quantum theory are forcing their way into humanity against the wishes of the physicists exploring it: Labutut is interested in the ideas of epiphany and, again and again, it seems that breakthroughs come in a way that the person concerned cannot afterwards explain. And some of the ideas at the heart of quantum theory are extremely unsettling.

Just over 40 years ago, I picked the university I attended because it was one of the few (that I stood a realistic chance of getting into) to include options to study general relativity and quantum theory as part of the mathematics course. Needless to say, I have forgotten virtually all of the mathematics that I enjoyed so much four decades ago, but my fascination with quantum theory has remained. This might be part of the reason that I enjoyed reading this book so much. That said, it doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the underlying maths or physics because it is more interested in speculating about what was going on in the minds of several men who changed the foundations of science in a thirty year period at the start of the last century.

And then there’s a little story called The Night Gardener to make you stop and think at the end.

Lababtut ended the interview I have referenced like this, and it is how I will end this review:

”But I do not offer answers in this book; on the contrary, the ideas that fascinate me are those that we simply cannot understand. Schwarzschild’s black hole, quantum mechanics, Mochizuki’s proof of the a b c conjecture, these are all ideas that seem to be more than we can handle, and that had ravaging effects on the people who first approached them.

What we can know and what we can never know; I believe that thinking deeply about those two things is a necessity, more than ever before. I think we need to ponder such things if we are to survive the wilderness of the 21st Century."

This is a Spanish translation by a Chilean author. The books starts out with a chronicle of facts about suicides following WWII, which, needless to say, was hard going! Within this though, are interesting scientific facts which caught the beginning of my interest: 40% of humanity do not possess the gene to distinguish the aroma of almonds given off by cyanide; that same poison is a by-product of the pigment beloved by artists; Prussian Blue. Fascinating. I was very quickly awed by the ingenious journey of facts from suicide to European art onwards: there is such a great deal of history just passingly mentioned with great skill - Labatut makes this journey of historical knowledge completely riveting.

This is not always an easy read; there’s next to no dialogue in the book, instead it’s a more of a narrative of historical characters who broke the ‘limits of thought’; it is however a highly interesting read. From the blurb I was expecting a piece of historical fiction about the brilliant twentieth century physics and mathematics that shaped modern day quantum mechanics - and it does recount that, but not like any other fiction book I have ever read or could have expected.

Schwarzchild becomes obsessed with trying to disprove the idea of the singularity which he finds in his equations (aka a black hole), something he can’t conceive of as truly possible and is in increasing despair over - physics loses all meaning at the point at which a black hole can exist. This is just one of the many ways the book approaches the concept of the title, within 5 distinct stories. Some of the stories I found more interesting than others.

Although this is most definitely fiction, most of what it recounts as far as I have looked up is fact, enveloped in beautiful prose. However, Labatut presents us to these scientists and mathematicians in a marvellous and engaging way, and one which helps in understanding the pioneering leaps of scientific discovery and debate. Recommended for fans of Carlo Rovelli.

I’m giving a 3, not because I think it is average, but because I’m unsure how I feel about it. It’s difficult to read genius summarising difficult to understand geniuses and their theories, so it’s... difficult to categorise or to rate. But very thought provoking.

My thanks to #NetGalley and Pushkin Press for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. This book is out on the 3rd September in the UK.

I really enjoyed this book a lot. The characters were clever and engaging, and getting to spend time with them was a treat. I liked the writing too - it was descriptive without ever veering into flowery territory, and I would certainly be interested in reading more work by this author. The cover is great too!