Lit in Translation

When We Cease to Understand the World

Un verdor terrible

Benjamín Labatut (born 1980)

Translated by Adrian Nathan West

English editions

In English

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Each piece follows the way science, through hunches, trials and theories, alters the world and the minds of those who pursue it, for good and ill. One line runs from Prussian blue, a pigment produced in the eighteenth century by an alchemist who tortured animals in search of eternal life, to cyanide gas, and on to Fritz Haber, the chemist who used it to make the pesticide Zyklon. Elsewhere Alexander Grothendieck's mathematics carries him into solitude, mysticism and madness; a friend of Einstein's, mortally ill at the front in 1914–1918, sends him an answer to his gravity equations that first foretells black holes; and Schrödinger and Heisenberg clash over how to describe the quantum world.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form
Short stories
Length
224 pages in the original
Genres
Historical (assigned by AI)
First published
2020 by Anagrama
Author's age
40 when first published
ISBN

9788433998972 (original)

9781782276142 (Pushkin Press, United Kingdom)

9781681375663 (New York Review Books, United States)