When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

 

To call anything nonfiction is probably naive.

I found it hard to put this book down to deal with the everyday things life puts in our way to keep us from reading.

Review

Despite my poor grasp of mathematics, I've had a nearly lifelong fascination with the discoveries of theoretical physics -- from reading George Gamow's One Two Three... Infinity as a teenager to Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos a few years ago. When We Cease To Understand the World reads like a series of biographical essays on the lives of the most crucial thinkers in modern physics, but the book's chapters are really fictional constructs that use the registers of nonfiction to arrive at deeper truths.

I honestly don't know how this book will strike you if you don't have a passing familiarity with names like Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. It is, however, beautifully written and focuses on human stories, so it probably won't matter if you've never heard of a Schwarzschild radius.

I really want to emphasize the quality of the writing itself. The book was originally written in Spanish (as Un verdor terrible), but Chilean author Benjamín Labatut speaks fluent English and collaborated closely on the translation.

The first section, called "Prussian Blue," is nominally about the chemist Fritz Haber and tells the stories of, among other things, cyanide, arsenic, chemical warfare, Zyklon-B, and the use of drugs to make German soldiers in World War II into fighting machines. (Along the way, we learn that the pigment for Prussian Blue was derived from cyanide salts.) Haber is known as the father of chemical warfare and was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people horribly with his chlorine gas in World War I. He also figured out how to extract nitrogen from the air to create the fertilizers that support half the world's populations today. (This is all true, by the way. Only the last paragraph of the story is fiction.) So, from the outset, we understand that these scientists' inner lives will be torn by the exigencies of war, loss, and doubt, and that the moral valences of their work may be hard to determine.

Of course, the intrusion of fiction into these accounts is bound to leave you wondering which parts are real and which are made up. In an interview, Labatut said that he thinks those who bother to do their own research will be surprised to find that many things which sound incredible really happened. "I'm using fiction to get people interested in things that are unbelievable but that are true."

While the work has been described as a non-fiction novel, the author says that he doesn't think of it as a novel at all. A collection of interrelated stories may be a better way to describe it. Certain themes wind through the book, and the final autobiographical section brings them together nicely. Whatever you call it, When We Cease To Understand the World is a gripping read and I highly recommend it.