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When We Cease to Understand the World

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When We Cease to Understand the World

By: Benjamín Labatut
Narrated by: Adam Barr
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About this listen

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.

A Guardian Fiction Book of the year.

Sometimes discovery brings destruction.

When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain.

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamín Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

©2020 Benjamín Labatut (P)2021 Pushkin Press Biographical Fiction Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction Psychological Fiction Biography

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Critic reviews

A monstrous and brilliant book.
-- Philip Pullman

Wholly mesmerising and revelatory... Completely fascinating.
-- William Boyd
All stars
Most relevant  
Echos the Eckhart Tolle story that you almost certainly need to flirt with destitution, loss and madness to find enlightenment, and im sure there has been a sizeable dollop of poetic license used in this books creation … but entertaining none the less. The back stories bring a type of stranger-than-though humanity to the scientists discussed … and it works. If the point is that nothing is truly bad, nor good - it works

Good read - easy listening

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The fiction is highly factual with imaginative license. It takes the detail of the science and what is known about the personalities to give both a critique and a contagion of 20th century genius.

Gripping tale of revolutionary science through the souls off scientists

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I've found this book enjoyable and informative, the author's style resembles one of W.G Sebald.

Curious

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Is this one book or four? All the real life stories are fascinating but it feels to me that the author had nothing really to say so padded it all out with what I’d call novelistic drivel. I’m guessing he wrote this under contractual obligation.

Rambling and unfocused

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I really enjoyed this book - it's full of the kind of facts & details, that help to paint a far more colorful & human picture of the various subjects, of which this it is about. It did lose me a bit towards the end, but really great book overall, and very well narrated..

A different perspective

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Unique subject matter. Very interestingly told. Took me so while to get it but once I did I loved it.

Innovative and interesting

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It's rare for me not to finish a book, but I couldn't take any more of the author constantly referring to Britain as England. I couldn't determine whether it was just laziness or deliberate, but he did a great disservice to all the Irish, Scots and Welsh soldiers who were killed in battle.

Lazy writing or editing

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this fiction, package from fact, should be outline so readers know what is real and what is made up. it's enjoyable to read but so is eating junk food

heading is optional but it's not

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Had this book been described to me as short biographies of several scientists then I would not have bought it; had it been described as biographical fiction I would definitely not have bought it; had it been described as biographical fiction with a strange obsession with the character's sexual predilections and habits then I would have run for the hills.

The book starts off with a fast-paced ride through some quirky if fairly well-known stories from the history of science - Fritz Haber, Alan Turing, etc., but there's nothing new here and the stories are mostly skipped through in a hurry.

The second half of the book is a heavily fictionalised biography of some physicists and mathematicians - primarily Schrödinger and Heisenberg. There's very little discussion of their maths and science with the focus being primarily on fictionalised accounts of their person lives - I'm left wondering why, what possible interest does this have for anyone? Their real biography would leave me cold; a fictional biography just seems pointless.

Biographical fiction... why?

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