Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World is an astonishing historical novel of war, human weakness and quantum physics. In a lovely translation from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, the fictionalized histories of Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and more come alive to disquiet and intrigue readers.
The book opens with Hermann Göring's addiction to dihydrocodeine and the suicides of many Nazi leaders by cyanide at the end of World War II. It gets only a little less grim from there. But even with such bleak subject matter, Labatut's imaginative evocations of disturbed minds from the rarified ranks of mathematics and physics are thoroughly captivating and strangely lovely, joining science with mysticism in surprising ways. "In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance."
Labatut's narrative travels in time and space, covering the development of pesticides, chemical weapons and Prussian blue pigment. This astonishing novel blends forms: lyrical, inventive and also rooted in history, concerned with the overlaps of genius and madness, innovation and destruction. "The physicist--like the poet--should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections," writes Labatut. The vision of reality painted by When We Cease to Understand the World is terrifying but finely wrought, and will live long in readers' minds. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia