“There are many deadly chemicals used for gardening, and there are many wonderful gardens in this place.”

The most notable feature of Benjamín Labatut’s work—apart from my personal voracious obsession with it and proselytizing to all of my friends and family about it—is its ability to occupy both space in fiction as well as space in nonfiction. If you’ve read about this book elsewhere you might know that large swaths of it are entirely fabricated by Labatut, despite the register of the book reading like a collection of biographies or essays. In fact, if you’ve finished the book and not read anything else about it, you could easily remain unaware that fiction lives within the book at all. So then what’s Labatut playing at? What does he mean by this blend of fantasy and reality? What does it mean to have real events and facts scaffold a world that is populated by motives and drives that are fictitious? What does he imagine the role of fiction to be in our complex modern world?

To understand anything about Labatut’s experiments and observations—I use these terms intentionally and pointedly—we have to turn our gaze to the subjects that he chooses to study. In When We Cease to Understand the World these are the mathematicians and theoretical physicists of the early twentieth century who preside over the discoveries that undergird our modern world. These are Labatut’s pantheon. A mathematical conference of sheepish bespectacled gods: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Grothendieck, Hilbert, Schwarzschild, Gödel, Haber, Bohr, Mochizuki, Einstein. But through them and underneath them run older currents, Telluric waves emanating from the Titans: Mary Shelley, Dr. Frankenstein, Cornelius Agrippa, Arthur Schopenhauer, Goethe, Dr. Faustus selling his soul for knowledge, Prometheus stealing fire from the gods themselves, and Odin putting out his eye for the cursed knowledge of a god. They all make appearances and poison the scattered network of facts and discoveries with perverse fictions of understanding.

So then, is Labatut playing the role of Prometheus? He certainly steals fire from his pantheon and brings it back to us. He uses a beautiful style of prose to abscond with concepts that are usually closed off to the laity. It’s a strange experience to be emotionally tied to black holes, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and see the fever dream visions that possessed their discoverers. Labatut packages these ideas like lightning harnessed into a torch. The results read with haunting ease. But in a modern quantum world of uncertainty and nondeterminism Labatut’s observations can’t be so simple. The people that he studies in this book ripped the floor out from under mankind, showing us that we stand not on a solid foundation of bedrock, but that we drift on Lovecraft’s ocean of noumenal unknowing. They showed that if you zoom in far enough to the atoms and subatomic particles that make up our world then the structures that we implicitly hold onto for sense in an impossible to know world are similarly foreign. Cause and effect become nonsensical when one is at the quantum scale. Time flows backwards beyond the event horizon of a black hole. We literally determine the state of the world through our observation of it at a specific moment in time. Any behavior that we ascribe to the pixels of our world before we observe them is pure speculation. Pure /fiction/.

And so Labatut isn’t just one of the gods in Olympus or even Prometheus himself, stealing their flaming ideas to bring to mankind. He is the bard that turns their stories into mythology. Karl Schwarzschild, one of the subjects of Labatut’s book described the perilous state of science in the early twentieth century nearly perfectly.“Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, or a madman, or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.” Labatut is one such organizing mystic, working with “a scrupulousness bordering on madness,” applying the only tool that he can to such an impossibly complex spray of information: fiction itself. The motive at the heart of an algebra of lives swimming around the most turbulent time of history is whatever Labatut decides to ascribe to his objects. He causes them to exist by his very act of literary observation.

We’ve spent a lot of time since the detonation of the atom bomb and the Holocaust trying to determine who we are and what art can and can’t be in an age catalyzed by such undeniable atrocity. The moment in time that our modern world compressed itself to a critical mass and became a black hole. We’ve been trying to read the scattered particles that shoot out of that unknowable black nucleus for a hundred years now and perhaps we’re no closer to understanding it. But luckily we have our own pantheon of literary mad scientists moving the history of Modernist literature forward. And with Labatut we have one who is willing to condense it all into a book so small and dense that it presents a barrier into the unknowable for us. It’s fun to keep bathing in the atomic glow of a tiny little book glued together with the poisonous runoff of abstraction run wild into a world that might never be ready to face its own knowledge.

I treasure this strange little book so much.