When We Cease To Understand The World

“Nothing is too beautiful to be true “ (in the paraphrase of Michael Faraday) being a phrase readers may find thrumming in at the back of their minds as they tear through the chapters of this short new hyper-parabolic novel, When We Cease to Understand the World , (just out from NYR Books in the US), a work of “fictive nonfiction” in the coinage of its prodigiously gifted young Chilean author, Benjamin Labatut. But beautiful, they may slowly came to realize, in the specifically Rilkean sense (beauty being “nothing but the beginning of a terror we can only just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us”); for the angels this novel’s protagonists–several of the greatest physicists and mathematicians of the early twentieth century (Haber, Einstein, Schwarzschild, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Griesedieck, among others)–take to wrestling, vertiginously, along the very rim of the yawning dawning abyss of quantum mechanics, are terrible indeed.

Benjamin Labatut was born in Rotterdam in 1980 and spent his early years caroming with his family between The Hague, Buenos Aires and Lima before settling in Santiago at age 14. When We Cease to Understand the World (originally titled Un verdor terrible), his third novel, has been developing an avid following throughout the world (especially in Italy) and was shortlisted for this year’s Booker International Prize following its publication in London by the Pushkin Press last year.

This conversation is part of the series “Mr. Weschler’s Cabinet of Wonders,” as part of “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.