When we no longer understand the world

◆Editor's recommendation:
★Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the U.S. National Book Award!
★Selected as one of the top ten books of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review!
★Selected for Obama's 2021 Summer Reading List!
★Recommended works by The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, etc.!
★ Where is the line between science and morality, genius and madness?
★ Breaking the boundaries between reality and fiction, creating a psychedelic and cold narrative style.
I'm in agony, feeling helpless, watching my sense of time, my unwavering resolve, my sense of responsibility and propriety all shattered! Who else but you can thank for this wonderful hell? Please tell me, when did all this madness begin? When did we stop understanding the world?
——"When We No Longer Understand the World"
◆Content Introduction:
This representative work by contemporary Chilean writer Benjamin Labatrote includes five short stories based on real people. The text blurs the lines between history, memoir, essay, and fiction, creating a unique narrative style. The book primarily recounts how a host of scientific giants, including Fritz Haber, the inventor of "poison warfare," Karl Schwarzschild, the proponent of "black hole theory," Erwin Schrödinger, who suffered from tuberculosis, and Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant physicist, all worked, like Prometheus, to bring fire to humanity.
◆Media recommendation:
Rabatut casts the light of the Gothic novel on twentieth-century science, telling the story of the kinship between knowledge and destruction, brilliance and madness, in five free-flowing vignettes.
——The New York Times Book Review
The book has familial ties to the works of Winfried Sebald or Olga Tolkachchuk: a series of narratives that skew biography but also venture into the realm of imagination. Stories nest within one another, their points of connection to reality almost impossible to pin down.
—The New Yorker
Dark and dazzling, Labatouille reveals the inextricable connection between horror and beauty, between saving lives and destroying them. This book—though erudite and haunting—stubbornly insists on linking the wonders of scientific progress with the atrocities of history.
—The Wall Street Journal
Rabatut offers a polished, unconventional, and thoroughly engrossing account of the personalities and wildly inventive minds that led to some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. The work's central theme is the entire drive for human exploration, and the dangers that lie within.
—Publishers Weekly
Labatou has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.
—The Guardian

2022-09-01

人民文学出版社

99 Readers

176

9787020173228