When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World (Un Verdor Terrible; lit. 'A Terrible Greening') is a book by the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut. Written in Spanish, translated to English by Adrian Nathan West, it was published in 2021 by the New York Review of Books. It is a novel that presents early scientists, who had made 'sacrifices' in revolutionizing science and its related fields. It focuses on the themes of sacrifice, madness, violence, and destruction that lie beneath the discovery of science and its advancement.

A historiographical metafiction with real, identified fiction that had either nonfiction or biographical narration, many critics either called the book a novel or a short story collection in essayistic mode. When We Cease to Understand the World was received with positive reviews, and was recognised in various award ceremonies, amongst others includes being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and listed for Barack Obama's annual Summer Reading List in 2021.

Background
When We Ceased to Understand the World was written by Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut from a scientific historical perspective to show the interplay between scientific discovery, and human experience. Born in Rotterdam and raised in various cities in the world, Labatut was inspired of how limited science was understood and the mysteries that lies beyond it. After he had sought to highlight the tension between the relentless human pursuit of knowledge and the profound monstrous unknowns that this pursuit uncovers, he characterised the book by using fictional themes to emphasize the indepth lives and personal costs of early scientists.

The book was first written and published in Spanish in 2020 under the title Un Verdor Terrible. It was later translated into English by Adrian Nathan West, who collaborated closely with Labatut to ensure the translation captured the essence and style of the original text, and published in 2021.

Style
Historiographic metafictions and non-fictional novels usually stress the openly totalizing power of the imagination of the writers to create unities. However, when the power not absent from the writers of history, as prone to flights of imagination as the writers of fiction. By blurring the line between history and fiction, the genre makes one question accept versions of history. While historiographic metafiction directly confronts the past of literature by a technique of rewriting to a new context, and presenting it to the present that it may be prevented from being conclusive and teleological. This is observed in When We Cease to Understand the World, as Labatut's prose presents individuals of immense importance in a less than flattering light, unlike the almost hagiographic accounts of men of science. With the power of his prose and imagination, Labatut subverts the status enjoyed by not just history, but science as well.

In When We Ceases to Understand the World, Labatut allows those scientists glance at what is called "truth" only after they have proven themselves worthy of the discovery through sacrifice. For example, Heisenberg scientifically concluded that he "seemed to have gouged out both his eyes in order to see further." Also Alexander Grothendieck was able to conclude that the atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations." The novels used scientific subjects: Mathematics, physics, quantum science, which the characters prioritized over pleasure including their families and friends. He used science to show how the characters see it as their god and in serving it, exposed them and the whole of humankind to a terrible suffering. When We Cease to Understand the World gives the impression of a wake-up call to the followers of this god—science, to "stop and reconsider" before reaching the final end. 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. Labatut used a precise style so that it often achieves concision, cruel and humor.

When We Cease to Understand the World blends fact and fiction. While interweaving between real historical and scientific details of imaginative storytelling such as creating a hybrid form that is neither purely a novel, a short story collection, nor an essay, Labatut employs a style that studied the limits and mysteries of science, the lives of scientists and mathematicians whose discoveries often lead to profound and unsettling consequences. The prose alternates between meticulously researched historical accounts and speculative, fictionalized narratives, which allows Labatut to make the personal and psychological impacts of scientific discoveries on the individuals involved. This blending of genres serves to highlight the complexities and moral ambiguities inherent in scientific advancement, showing how great intellectual achievements can lead to both enlightenment and destruction.

The book's style also reflects a fascination with the incomprehensible and the monstrous aspects of scientific progress. Labatut uses fiction not just to embellish historical facts but to probe the deeper, often darker aspects of human understanding and its limits. This method enables him to portray the inner turmoil and existential crises of figures like Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, making their stories both intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant. Labatut's style in When We Cease to Understand the World is a distinctive blend of narrative forms, creating a compelling exploration of the human condition through the lens of scientific discovery and its discontents.

Themes
When We Cease to Understand the World explores the themes of duality in scientific discovery, the intersection of knowledge and destruction, and the philosophical mysteries underlying reality. Through historical and fictional narratives, the book was a narrative telling the lives of scientists who had impacted the world with new and early discoveries such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. It illustrates the profound, sometimes catastrophic implications of their work while laying emphasis on the theme of inscrutability of the universe, the existential consequences of scientific advancements, and the inevitable confrontation with the unknown.

With the theme of intersection between being mad and being super intelligent, When We Cease to Understand the World highlighted in details the popular belief that genius and well-creative beings are works of mental pathology, which had spanned centuries from the time of Greek philosopher Aristotle. While contemporary early modern research argued against being a scientific fact, Labatut used it in a poetic style while capturing the theme in a literary sense. For example, the scientifical characters were simplified to varying degree of madness which extends from a normal eccentric behaviors to observable hallucinations; those which inspired some of their researches.

In the book, many scientists were described as having unnormal degree of compulsions which revolver their obsession with their work. As used when describing Karl Schwarzschild, who was a child and single-minded when doing astronomical equations in the margins of his school note books as well as the damages he gets after he had removed his hand gloves to make notes in a freezing cold. Also, Shinichi Mochizuki was described as one who stays for days without food or rest while reading the works of Alexander Grothendieck and was inspired to become a mathematician.

Agonies of Conception
Wonder about the inner workings of a phenomenon to the point of obsession and isolation, followed by fever leading to fascination; a loss of self and the feeling of one's mind not being his own, finally birthing a discovery met with the utter disbelief of others, upending all dominant notions of the time, are the steps which the great minds in Labatut's scientific-fiction-cum-horror-story When We Cease to Understand the World either climb or descend. That is what happened to José Arcadio Buendía and the great scientific minds etched in history undergo the same in Labatut's novel. These characters survive toils that are reminiscent of Lovecraftian insanity and otherworldliness. Immense physical and mental suffering is concomitant to significant scientific breakthroughs. For example, Fritz Haber saved peoples lives with his invented nitrogen fertilizer, as well as killed many during the First World War. Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck did applicable things. The geniuses of quantum science have their minds and bodies racked by their discoveries. The impact of their accomplishment leaves their minds as confused as the world they made it for. While the novel uses fictionalized yet true facts and factual fictional narrative as seen in the death wish which took the Nazi party towards the end of the World War II, Erwin Rommel took his own life. Stylising violence, the novel attested how great scientific discoveries took birth in violence. Astronomer Schwarzschild solved Einstein's equation by imagining a perfect star and how it would alter mass and space. Fact gives way to fiction and imagination when Schwarzschild voluntarily enlisted in the Prussian military because he wants to show his patriotism which went beyond military service. In Labatut's narration of Schwarzschild's childhood and the antics of growing up, one finds it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, as well as between history and when it is the author's imagination. In the novel, Labatut efficiently employed his prose to expose the ill foundations of his historical narrative and using his own words to render truth that it is neither seen as real or imagined.

Schwarzschild, who appears to be a main character damaged one of his eyes while viewing a solar eclipse, and when his friends had shown concern, he had done it intentionally in order to see further with the other eye, thus, the theme of sacrifice. Shinichi Mochizuki denied himself food or sleep that he stays in the midnight for days being exhausted and dehydrated, yet kept studying the works of Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. The theme of human interaction emphasised along sacrifice, how these characters prefer being isolated from pleasure to work perfectly. The novel often uses the theme social phobia which segregates them from living like other normal beings. Heisenberg, that he might escape microscopic particles affecting him, ran to Helgoland in 1925, where he understood the behavior, shapes and system of function of the elementary particles. Yet his continued nightmares (hallucinations) continued like spinning in the center of his room, the Sufi mystic Hafez drunk and naked, barking at him like a dog, etc. It's most difficult for one to know whether it is the author's imagination or true fact. Hence, the force of the prose obscures the boundary, thus "wrapping fiction in the gown of fact."

Critical reception
When We Cease to Understand the World was received with net positive reviews from critics. According to literary review aggregator Book Marks, the book received "positive" reviews based on 6 critic reviews with 3 being "rave" and 2 being "positive" and 1 being "mixed". In Books in the Media, a site that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (3.33 out of 5) from the site which was based on 3 critic reviews.

It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. It was selected by Barack Obama in 2021 for his annual Summer Reading List. 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. 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.

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", 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."

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." 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."