Benjamin Labatut

At its core, When We Cease to Understand the World is a work of fiction. Its author, Benjamin Labatut, dramatizes a set of mathematical discoveries, imagining himself into the lives of the figures whose research and eccentricities led to those discoveries. Cease to Understand functions as a novel, but it is one which straddles a very fine line. And it does this magnificently. 

When Labatut introduces the impact, say, of Heisenberg, he does this not only by way of discoveries and theories, but through a set of relationships and events. Labatut claims that the amount of 'fiction' in this book increases over time, and that the early stories are more faithful to documented events than those later in the collection. But that does not really account for what's going on here: because, in all cases, in all stories, Labatut introduces a fictional narrative; he traces relationships, personalities, families. He adds to this with periodic dialogue -- even with descriptions of the weather, of the geography. 

The result is a book reminiscent of the style and orientation of W. G. Sebald, whose own novels sit in that unusual space between the real and the imagined, between history and fiction. When Labatut presents the discoveries of Haber or Schrödinger, for instance, he does so as a novelist: it is the events which lead to the discovery which matter; it is the isolation, the struggle, the malnourishment which, in some sense, become the discovery, the unveiling. Had Labatut included pictures, his book would have veered even closer, say, to Sebald's Rings of Saturn. 

Part of the most upsetting and lasting aspects of Cease to Understand is its emphasis on destruction. There is no doubt, sadly, that the theories unearthed by Labatut's cadre of mathematicians unlocked the violence wrought during the world wars. That correlation in itself is unnerving. But worse than that, according to Labatut, is a second sort of destruction: the one in which science, for all its advancements, ceases to present a basic understanding of the world. When this happens, it's a short distance to something more disorienting: humans lose the capacity to understand what it means to be human. We take recourse to a form of science and technology which can no longer present -- with Newtonian certainty -- the world which around us.

Whether this is fiction, history, or philosophy seems beside the point: Cease to Understand is a warning: about how much we've accomplished, and about how little we actually know. The distance between the two is the violence of the last century.