This book was a curiosity to me – a “blend of fiction and historical fact” is how it was most often described. But how is that going to work? Truthfully, I read almost exclusively genre fiction, and sometimes feel like I’m missing out or disconnected from the real world – I picked this up wondering if it could reconnect me.
The publisher of the book says that When We Cease to Understand the World “is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.” Expanding on that, I would argue that they should add two words after “complicated” – the complicated “and theoretical”. Labatut blends actual fact (dates, names, discoveries, the scientific explanations) with unclear fiction (histories, thoughts, feelings, dreams/nightmares, relationships with other scientists).
If you couldn’t tell from the snark above, I have ambivalent feelings towards this book! The first third or so GRABBED me – I could barely put it down, and was excitedly reading parts of it to my partner. But as the book went on, more and more bizarre stories began to be told:
- Shinichi Mochizuki, infamous mathematician, is implied to have visited and learned the knowledge of Alexander Grothendieck on his deathbed: “… received only a single visitor, a tall, timid Japanese man… spent five days sitting on the edge of the bed during visitor hours, bent over in a very uncomfortable posture to bring his ear as close as possible to the patient’s mouth, all the while scribbling in a notebook.” As far as I can tell, this meeting is completely fabricated.
- Werner Heisenberg seeks to “decipher the mysteries of the quantum realm”. His solutions to this mystery come to him in the midst of a fevered hallucination: “When he [Hafez] could not wake them from their trance, he pissed on them one by one, leaving a trace of yellow spots on the pale fabric of their tunics, a pattern in which Heisenberg thought he could glimpse the secret of his matrices.”
Were these real, or completely imagined? Wouldn’t some of these historical figures be insulted by these passages? I don’t know, and honestly don’t have the time to fact-check everything. However, I need to point out that the book is very engaging and Labutat is a strong writer, both sentence-by-sentence and as a whole. I understood his thesis, and was very interested in how he would get there.
I can’t recommend this book as a piece of historical fact – its uncertainties undermine its theme, and lead to a lack of trust in the author. However, if you are willing to treat the whole work as fiction, it’s a fascinating read! Captivating, well-written and perhaps even inspirational. I would absolutely read more purely fictional novels written by Labatut.
