when we cease to understand the world (benjamín labatut, tr. adrian nathan west)

I am not sure how I came across Labatut’s spectacular text. It was only in the final section, when the word araucana cropped up, that I realised the writer would appear to occupy the same Southern Cone as me. I had assumed the book to be the work of some nebulous Frenchman, out to save the planet from the repercussions of the first world’s scientific acts of hari-kari. 

Labatut’s book is about the way in which the world has evolved and been formed over the course of the last century, and not, as the epilogue makes clear, for the better. The book looks at half a dozen or so high priests of science, including Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger, and the way in which their theories interacted with their lives. We learn how these eminently masculine souls wrestled with their flesh and their minds to come up with ways of contemplating the world which not only seemed at first extra-terrestrial, but also laid down the matrix upon which, the book contends, modern technological society is structured. From computing to global warming.

This in itself, the writer’s capacity to convey ideas of enormous complexity in a graspable, human fashion, would be one achievement. However, When We Cease to Understand the world achieves something else. The longest chapter in the book deals with sub-atomic theory, the idea that an atomic particle is both a wave and a fixed point. How this seeming paradox came to be defined and what it means for the world. We start to read the book as a work of non-fiction. It is discussing real people, real events, real history. However, as the book evolves, it gradually starts to inhabit spaces that seem beyond the author’s objective knowing. The inside of a scientist’s mind. The secret world that only they can know. We, as readers, perhaps assume that the author has somehow obtained letters or a journal written by the scientist, to allow him, the author, this privileged access. Only as the book hurtles towards its atomic finale, do we start to glean that this is not a work of non-fiction, but a work of fiction. Or perhaps it is both fiction and non-fiction at the same time?