This is the second installment of Shorties, a series where I review a short book off my shelf each week for ten weeks. Next week I will read and write about Bugsy by Rafael Frumkin.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut. New York Review Books, 2021. 192 pages.
Perhaps through osmosis of thought with my then-mentor, sometime in 2023 I became interested in a radioactive contamination event known as the Goiânia accident, which occurred in Goiânia, Brazil, in 1987. My curiosity was about accidents in general; my mentor was working on a project about the atom bomb and its fallout.
The Goiânia accident can be summarized as follows: After a security guard failed to show up at the abandoned former site of a radiotherapy institute, which contained machinery with radioactive material inside it, thieves stole the machines hoping to sell them for parts. In taking apart one of the pieces of machinery, the two men exposed themselves to caesium-137 in the core of a piece of machinery. They became ill and would eventually suffer burns from touching the radioactive substance. After selling pieces including substance—which was partly exposed after one of the men tinkered with the capsule in which the caesium was contained—to a scrapyard, several others were poisoned.
From inside the capsule, one could see a blue glow emitting from the caesium. The scrapyard owner invited people to come look at it over the few days it was in his possession, thinking he was in possession of something magical or supernatural. All four of the people who died as a direct result of the incident were connected to the scrapyard owner—two of them were his employees and two of them were members of his family. One was a child, his niece, who had been playing with pieces of the caesium immediately before eating an egg, which I always picture as hard boiled.
Which I say to illustrate or emulate the style that appears more eloquently in When We Cease to Understand the World, a book that concerns itself with a few scientific discoveries made in the twentieth century which shaped the course of humanity and scientific understanding. This begins with cyanide and ends with quantum physics, and the stories Labatut tells become increasingly fictionalized. The final story is entirely fictional, almost a fable. Thematically the book is concerned with how genius and destruction intertwine.
Rather than try to write a “smart” review of an already smart book, and risk coming off like a real dumbass, for this week I’d like instead to write about the people in my life it made me think of and why, beginning with my mentor, KT, who has almost certainly already read this book and almost certainly does not read this blog.
KT was interested in a few things at the time I knew them best: the atomic bomb and its fallout; critical theory, especially Foucault, or certainly teaching his work; and the problem of being an academic. These were the things I was allowed to know about their concerns in our limited and highly atomized relationship, and I learned over time how much space each of these things took in their brain. By atomized, I mean that our relationship was, like all student-teacher relationships, simultaneously a microcosm of and separate from the graduate program we were part of. Because students and teachers are not allowed to just be friends—not until one leaves their post—ours was a relatively formal relationship: we met almost exclusively in their office, and allowed ourselves to diverge topically from my thesis only to talk about culture or books, and almost never about personal matters. This was understandable to me, symptomatic of KT’s general thoughtfulness (which bordered on overthinking). Still, I felt I knew them, and that we understood each other uniquely well.
I usually wonder what KT would think of any book I’m reading. (They introduced me to César Aira, who wrote last week’s shortie.) This one was no exception, and their presence in my internal world was magnified by the discussion of quantum physics in When We Cease, a topic which KT was particularly interested in as they wrote the syllabus for the last class I took with them. That class was about houses and archives and spacetime. I guess, actually, I thought of them for a few reasons: There are so many ways to tell a story, something KT imparted on us over and over again in an attempt to get us to write more interesting, challenging work, and a sort of foundational thematic element of Labatut’s book. But also, KT is something of a genius, the rare kind of deep thinker who almost thinks too much, to a degree that seems to trouble them. And yet, without that trouble, could they still be a genius? What is the role of trouble to a genius?
The other person I thought of while reading this book is my dad, who is an engineer and generally curious person (also not a reader of this blog). I’m in a habit lately of gifting my dad shorter books for two reasons: because, despite being someone who likes to read and a completionist, he doesn’t always finish them; and because he doesn’t always have much to say about them. (Of Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp in the original Spanish, which I think I gave him for Christmas, he said, That guy just writes whatever comes into his head. He is so weird!)
I think there’s a chance that, like many readers of this book, my dad might walk away a little confused by what is and is not real. But as a reader, he always tries to meet whatever he’s reading where it is. This is something I really appreciate about my dad, and a quality not everyone has. I think it’s related to his love of math and tinkering and learning. My dad is the only STEM-ish person in our family; I sense he is in some distant way disappointed that he had two daughters, not because we’re girls, but because we didn’t do the hard thing and become engineers like him. This is less a character flaw than it is a colorful trait, less about resentment than about dashed dreams, the what if that accompanies any life choice. Incidentally, the book is both about scientific discovery and about the what if of living.
In my cursory search of When We Cease to Understand the World, a Reddit thread came up in which several people who have just read or are in the midst of reading the book are trying to work it out. Several commenters note that they liked the first, more factual half, and that the second lost them. Someone described the latter half as “perverse and disturbing,” which tickled me. I was particularly interested in one comment:
Is no one bothered with the concern that their head will be filled up with fiction that is later remembered as factual?
I was, truly, struck by this notion, which logically implies that all fictionalized accounts have the capability to change history. To believe that, though, you also have to believe that history lives in us, not in texts or images or anywhere else. You have to believe in history itself. Is no one bothered? In a way, it’s almost inspiring—it’s rare to find someone so concerned with the workings of fiction in the world. I don’t know that that’s Labatut’s point, exactly. It is poignant nonetheless. 🐁