User:SafariScribe/When We Cease to Understand the World
| Author | Benjamín Labatut |
|---|---|
| Translator | Adrian Nathan West |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Nonfiction, Fiction, Historical fiction, Alternate history |
| Published | 2021 (New York Review of Books) |
| Pages | 192 |
| ISBN | 9781681375663 |
When We Cease to Understand the World (Spanish: Un Verdor Terrible; lit. 'A Terrible Greening'), published in 2021, is a book by the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut. It selected certain individuals known to have sacrificed in revolutionizing science and other related humanitarian mankind while focusing on the themes of sacrifice, madness, and destruction hidden beneath the discovery of science and its development.[1] The book was a real identified fiction, and was either called a nonfiction, novel, or biographical narration.
Due to its difficulty in classification, many critics called it a novel, others a short story collection of essayistic mode.[2]
Background[edit]
Plot summary[edit]
The book ended when the "night gardener" was telling the narrator about the death of the citrus trees, which atlas yield monstrous crop. But when those fruits ripen, the trees' whole limbs breaks because of huge weight, and after a few weeks, will be covered up by the ground with rotting lemons. To him, it was very strange.
Style[edit]
In When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut wrote with a beginning scenario of apocalypse. It was seen revolving his narration of the "Night Gardener"; wavering between different opinions of world creation and it's destruction.[2] Labatut used a precise style so that it often achieves concision, cruel and humor.[3]
Themes[edit]
Critical reception[edit]
When We Cease to Understand the World was selected by Barack Obama in 2021 for his annual Summer Reading List.[4] It was a Finalist for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction by Los Angeles Times. While Labatut said the book is a "work of fiction based on real events", John Banville of the British magazine The Guardian argued of it better called a nonfiction novel, since the majority of the characters are historical figures, and the narratives were based on historical fact.[5] Franklin Ruth of The New Yorker said it was a meditation in prose that bears a familial relationship to the work of W. G. Sebald or Olga Tokarczuk, while detailing a sequential biography of both.[6]
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in The New York Times Book Review praised the book as "a gripping meditation on knowledge and hubris. [Labatut] casts the flickering light of gothic fiction on 20th-century science",[7] while John Williams in The New York Times Book Review says that When We Cease to Understand the World "fuses fact and fiction to turn the modern history of physics into a gripping narrative of obsessed scientists, world-changing discoveries, and the ultimate results—often quite dark—of our drive to understand the fundamental workings of the universe." While reviewing the book for the The Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks praised the book as "Darkly dazzling". Furtherly asserting that Labatut illustrates "the unbreakable bond between horror and beauty. The book as haunting as it is, stubbornly insists on connecting the wonders of scientific advancement to the atrocities of history."[8]
In a starred review by Publishers Weekly, the book called Labatut’s stylish English-language debut "offers an embellished, heretical, and thoroughly engrossing account of the personalities and creative madness that gave rise to some of the 20th-century's greatest scientific discoveries."[9] Constance Grady in writing for the American news website Vox wrote, "When We Cease to Understand the World is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read all year, and one of the weirdest, too. Its subject seems to be scientific awe: the cosmic horror of seeing what lies at the center of the universe, and how very far such realities are from our small human ways of perceiving the world."[10]
References[edit]
Notes[edit]
Citations[edit]
- ^ Shaheen 2021, pp. 714–725.
- ^ a b Muller 2022, pp. 9–28.
- ^ Daguerre 2021, p. 24.
- ^ Janfaza 2021.
- ^ Banville 2020.
- ^ Nast & Franklin 2021.
- ^ Fonseca-Wollheim 2021.
- ^ Sacks 2021.
- ^ PublishersWeekly.com.
- ^ Grady 2022.
Bibliography[edit]
- Banville, John (September 10, 2020). "When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut review – the dark side of science". The Guardian. Kings Place, London, UK. ISSN 1756-3224. OCLC 60623878. Retrieved May 8, 2024.
- Daguerre, Bernard (February 1, 2021). "Bleu de Prusse et sauts quantiques". Le Monde diplomatique (in French). Paris, France: Maurice Lemoine. ISSN 0026-9395. OCLC 978864059. Retrieved May 8, 2024.
- Fonseca-Wollheim, Corinna da (September 24, 2021). "Book Review: 'When We Cease to Understand the World,' by Benjamín Labatut". The New York Times. Manhattan, New York, U.S. ISSN 1553-8095. OCLC 1645522. Retrieved May 8, 2024.
- Grady, Constance (February 28, 2022). "When We Cease to Understand the World asks what it means to be human". Vox. New York City, New York, US: Vox Media. Retrieved May 8, 2024.
- Janfaza, Rachel (July 10, 2021). "Here's what Barack Obama recommends you read this summer". CNN. Retrieved May 8, 2024.
- Muller, Gesine (October 10, 2022). "The Post-Global Challenge in the Debate over World Literature". Post-Global Aesthetics. De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110762143-002. ISBN 978-3-11-076214-3.
- Nast, Condé; Franklin, Ruth (September 3, 2021). "A Cautionary Tale About Science Raises Uncomfortable Questions About Fiction". The New Yorker. New York, US. ISSN 0028-792X. OCLC 320541675. Retrieved May 8, 2024.
- "When We Cease to Understand The World by Benjamin Labatut". Publishers Weekly. New York City, US: Cevin Bryerman. ISSN 0000-0019. OCLC 2489456. Retrieved May 8, 2024.
- Sacks, Sam (September 24, 2021), "Fiction: 'Bewilderment' and 'When We Cease to Understand the World'", The Wall Street Journal, New York City, New York, US: Almar Latour, ISSN 1042-9840, OCLC 781541372, retrieved May 8, 2024
- Shaheen, Aamir (December 31, 2021). "Historiographic Metafictional Portraits of Twentieth Century Scientists in Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World". Pakistan Social Sciences Review. 5 (IV): 714–725. doi:10.35484/pssr.2021(5-IV)54. ISSN 2664-0430.