Ceasing to Understand the World

This unconventional novel, or perhaps better put, the non-non-fiction book, was published in 2020 in English translation. In When We Cease to Understand the World, the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut interlaces exposition of some of the most puzzling developments in science during the 20th century with imagined accounts of the puzzlement their discoverers must have felt. Labatut told the New York Times Book Review podcast: “The book is trying to deal with these ideas that exceed our understanding and that, in some sense, those ideas infected the form of the book, and made it hang in a strange liminal space where fact and fiction get blurred because it’s trying to look at these things that actually blur if you look at them closely.” … “[C]ertain ideas and happenings that exceed our capacity for understanding. … The book is trying to deal with these ideas that exceed our understanding and that, in some sense, those ideas infected the form of the book, and made it hang in a strange liminal space where fact and fiction get blurred because it’s trying to look at these things that actually blur if you look at them closely” (Williams & Labatut, 2021).

November 2023

Williams, J., & Labatut, B. (2021). One Factory and the Bigger Story It Tells: Farah Stockman talks about 'American Made,' and Benjamín Labatut discusses 'When We Cease to Understand the World'. New York Times Book Review Podcast Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/books/review/podcast-farah-stockman-american-made-benjam-labatut-when-we-cease-to-understand-world.html?showTranscript=1